๐Ÿ› ๏ธ Automating Git Repo Updates and Navigation with a POSIX Shell Script

๐Ÿ“† 2025-07-10 17:43

Managing multiple Git repositories for different services or components can get tedious. Whether you're working on small personal projects like a blog, a Gemini site, or HTTP microservices, jumping between directories and pulling the latest changes manually is a chore.

Thatโ€™s why I wrote a simple, POSIX-compliant shell script to:

Letโ€™s break it down.

๐Ÿ“ The Script

Hereโ€™s the core of the script:

โš™๏ธ What It Does

๐Ÿ”ง Why POSIX sh?

While Bash offers features like arrays and select, I wanted this script to run in any Unix-like environment, including:

This means no Bash-isms โ€” just pure POSIX sh, making it portable and dependable.

๐Ÿš€ How To Use

Save the script as update-git-repos.sh

Edit variables

You have to edit only 2 things at the top of the script:

Make it executable:

Run the script

Run it with an alias

You can add an alias for the script by adding this line to your shell's config file (e.g., .bashrc, .zshrc, or .profile):

Read more about Using aliases for complex and daily terminal commands

๐Ÿ’ก Final Thoughts

This script has been a small but helpful productivity boost for juggling multiple personal projects. It saves time, avoids repetitive commands, and keeps everything in sync. And because it's written in portable sh, it'll run practically anywhere.

If you find this useful, feel free to adapt it to your own workflow:

The point is: let your tools work for you.

Happy hacking!

๐Ÿšถ Back to my blog

The page https://sava.rocks/blog/automating-git-repo-updates-and-navigation-with-a-posix-shell-script/ is served from my cluster by tiny and available on 2 other protocols:
Gemini:
gemini://sava.rocks/blog/automating-git-repo-updates-and-navigation-with-a-posix-shell-script/
Gopher:
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How can you reach these protocols ?
It's simple. Details are found here for gopher and here for gemini on Wikipedia.
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