How do I include my first commit in my cherry pick command?

Question

Cliffnotes version

• Assume I want to run this command: git cherry-pick ABC..XYZ. I want ABC to be included in my commits to the current branch. Do I have to reference the commit before ABC?

Long Version

• So I have branches master, Apple and NewApple.
• Apple was built upon a very old version of master but only worked on a dozen files which were implemented on folders which the rest of the master did not really touch.
• Apple has commits ABC, BCD, and XYZ. These are commits unique to Apple. Please note there are about 10 commits between BCD and XYZ. These commits were NEVER commited tomaster`
• So I made a new branch NewApple which is spun off of a newer versions of master, ones with newer commits.
• Then I cherry-picked commits from Apple to put onto NewApple like so git cherry-pick ABC..XYZ
• However, when finished and committed to my remote repository, I noticed that ABC was not included. Everything after it and including XYZ were put onto NewApple.
• I want to be able to commit ABC as part of my cherry-pick without referencing the commit that is before it in Apple. I am afraid that if I do, I won't get all the commits in Apple or it will try to merge in random older master commits on top of newer versions of master.

Answer 1

... git cherry-pick ABC..XYZ [but] I want ABC to be included in my commits to the current branch. Do I have to reference the commit before ABC?

Short answer: yes.

Longer variety of answer: Git has a syntax for that, since it's such a common requirement. Any name suitable for identifying one specific commit, such as master or a123456, can be suffixed with ^ or ~ characters followed by numbers. The default number is just 1, and hence:

master^

or

master~

means "the commit before the one selected by the name master".

In this case, then, you might write:

git cherry-pick ABC^..XYZ

Note that Windows-y command line interpreters tend to treat ^ as an escape character, requiring entering the command using ABC^^..XYZ or "ABC^..XYZ", so there you might prefer ~. Either one works here.

(More specifically, ^number means the number-th parent, while ~number tells Git to count back that many first-parents. So master~3 means the same as master^1^1^1. Since 1 is the default number, you can write this as master^^^ as well. There are many more ways to identify commits, all outlined in the gitrevisions documentation.)