You don't want to run git-rebase out of a cron job, because it may require human interaction. The simplest thing might be to make the temporary commits onto a separate branch, and throw that branch away periodically.
Thanks to you & Alex for suggesting this. So, at this point I need to ask an embarassingly basic question: how do I "change branches" from T (say), in order to commit to a different branch A, without changing the contents of the working directory back to match what it was at the time of the last commit to A? (I know this is not the thing you normally want to do.) Ie, in terms of diagrams I've got my archival commit branch with its hourly commits running along the top and the temporary branch with its temporary commits running along the bottom and a $ means that, considered just as commited trees the objects linked are the same: a-----------a-----------a \ $ $ \-t---t---t---t---t---t---t---t (In case it's not clear, the "temporary branch" record extends past the last "archival commit" and throwing away the temporary commits shouldn't remove any archival commits.) So I'm on the temporary branch and have been doing temporary commits to it and we hit an hour mark. Cron wants to commit what's _currently_ in my working directory as a new head to the "archival branch" A and then swap back the temporary branch to commit it on that branch and carry on, ie, make the diagram look like: a-----------a-----------a-----------a \ $ $ $ \-t---t---t---t---t---t---t---t---t AIUI neither git-branch nor git-checkout provide a way to do this. (Clearly the git datastructures can represent this situation, I'm just not sure how to ask the tools to do it.) Again, thanks for all the assistance, -- cheers, dave tweed__________________________ david.tweed@xxxxxxxxx Rm 124, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading. Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html