Scenario

A Git repository at /home/interview/repo has a feature-api branch that was created from origin/main some time ago. The branch has your commits plus merge commits from pulling updates, making it difficult to identify which commits are unique to your branch.

Task

Find commits unique to your branch compared to origin/main, exclude merge commits, write the unique commits to /home/interview/unique-commits.txt, and verify the file contains only the unique commits.

Note: The remote repository origin is already configured.

Example

# Before (file does not exist)

ls: cannot access '/home/interview/unique-commits.txt': No such file or directory

# After (unique commits saved to file)

File created with unique commits from feature-api branch
Merge commits excluded
Only commits not present in origin/main are listed

Example '/home/interview/unique-commits.txt' content:
"""
ree2ras Commit message
cji29nc Commit message
ch92uhd Commit message 
"""

Step 1: Navigate to the repository

cd /home/interview/repo

Step 2: Check current branch

git branch

Verify you're on the feature-api branch.

Step 3: View commits unique to your branch

git log --oneline origin/main..feature-api

The .. syntax shows commits in feature-api but not in origin/main. This reveals only unique work on your branch.

Step 4: Exclude merge commits

git log --oneline --no-merges origin/main..feature-api

The --no-merges flag excludes merge commits, which don't represent actual code changes but just branch integration.

Step 5: Write unique commits to file

git log --oneline --no-merges origin/main..feature-api > /home/interview/unique-commits.txt

The > operator redirects output to a file instead of the terminal.