A Bash Function to Create Git Branches

I'm currently doing some work on our corporate website, working through a long list of generally minor issues and learning Rails in the process. I'm still at the point where I want to code-review every change, and I also have the philosophy that every issue should be independent. So I'm creating a lot of branches.

After accidentally creating a couple of those branches from other branches rather than master, I added the following function to my .bashrc:

function branch { 
    if git branch | grep -q " $1\$" ; then
        git checkout $1
    else
        git checkout master
        git checkout -b $1
        git push origin $1
    fi ; }

Invoke this as branch branch_name. If there's already a branch with that name, it runs git checkout to switch to that branch — which will fail if you have unstashed changes on the current branch.

Otherwise, it switches to master and then creates the new branch. In both the local and origin repository (we use GitHub at work, so everyone on a project has his or her own fork). If you don't have a similar setup, delete that push — or change it to point to a backup repository.