CIA git tips

The CIA’s engineering team kept an internal Confluence wiki (“Add your best Git tricks here! Share the love!”) — it leaked in the 2017 WikiLeaks Vault 7 publication, and the git tips page is immortal: mundane, practical, and identical to what every team’s wiki accumulates. Full verbatim capture (recovered off-host — the wiki macros don’t render for direct fetchers): clippings/wikileaks-org-ciav7p1-cms-page-1179773-html.md.

The tips that stuck

• Branch cleanup one-liner — git branch --merged | grep -v "\*\|master" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d: delete every already-merged local branch, safely (-d refuses unmerged). Lived in spencer.wtf’s ~/.zshrc since he found the page (capture: clippings/spencer-wtf-2026-02-20-cleaning-up-merged-git-branches-a-one-liner-from-the-cias-leaked-dev-docs-html.md) — the variant with origin/master + develop in the grep guard is on the page itself.
• Split a subdirectory into a new repo — git filter-branch --prune-empty --subdirectory-filter plugins/mylib mylib after cloning + branching, then push to the new remote. (Modern replacement: git filter-repo — filter-branch is deprecated and warns, but the page’s recipe is the ancestor.)
• ours/theirs aliases — ours = "!f() { git checkout --ours $@ && git add $@; }; f" — take a conflicted file wholesale from one side during a merge; the shell-function hack exists just to make $@ behave.
• alias-listing alias — git config --get-regexp 'alias.*' piped through colrm/sed — for when you can’t remember the alias you set.
• The rest: commit --amend -C HEAD vs -m, reset --soft HEAD^ vs --hard, git stash branch (stash + new branch + re-stage in one move), full bisect start/bad/good/run/reset walkthrough, and GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY for self-signed remotes.

Where it fits

• The stash/reset/amend/bisect tricks are the same toolkit as Git recovery (ORIG_HEAD, rerere) and the Git Legit set (Git commit messages) — vault7 is the 2015-ish ancestor of all of them.
• The bisect walkthrough pairs with regression-test-first bisecting (clippings/dev-to-paulinevos-fix-bugs-fast-with-regression-tests-and-auto-bisect-3khh.md).
• Filter-branch/subdirectory-split is repo surgery — kin to monorepo extraction, the one genuinely structural tip on the page.

Related: Git recovery · Git commit messages · Git housekeeping · Git hooks · Diff tools