git-newbranchname

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission.

For single file changes the GitHub on-site editor is often sufficient however the branch name will be something like patch-1, patch-2, etc and incrementing up as you make more. However this naming scheme can be confusing because in the event you end up needing to checkout the changes locally it will create a branch with that name and then once the branch is merged upstream it will be deleted from origin but not your local checkout. This then leads to a confusing situation where when you make another patch and the branch name given by GitHub is yet again patch-1.

As a result I started generating my own branch names like so:

git-newbranchname-old() {
  echo "nektro-patch-${RANDOM}"
}

This worked great for a while, however I did end rewriting this since I ran into some situations where the $RANDOM bash variable was providing me with very low entropy and I was still getting branch name collisions. I unforunately did not document why this was happening, but I did come up with a new version that will not ever have that issue, and this is the one I still use today:

actualrandom() {
  cat /dev/urandom | head -c $1 | xxd -ps | awk '{printf "0x" $0}' | xargs -0 printf "%d\n"
}
git-newbranchname() {
  rand=$(actualrandom 2)
  echo "nektro-patch-${rand}"
}