Lesson 9 of 11By Simplilearn
Last updated on Oct 22, 202024520Git is the most popular source code management system—used by over 40 million people. Whether you're a programmer or a non-technical person, Git will help you with its collaboration features like bug tracking, task management, and wikis.
Git plays a significant role in an organization to achieve DevOps. Looking at the popularity of Git, it's quite evident that there will be many job opportunities in the near future. If you’re in the market for one of these jobs, here are some of the Git interview questions that might help you in cracking the interview.
In this article, we’ll look at the various questions that could be asked in a Git interview, which are divided into three sections:
Let’s get started!
Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and is used to help coordinate work among several people on a project while tracking progress over time. In other words, it’s a tool that facilitates source code management in software development.
Git favors both programmers and non-technical users by keeping track of their project files. It enables multiple users to work together and handles large projects efficiently.
A version control system (VCS) is a system that records all changes made to a file or set of data, so a specific version may be called later if needed.
This helps ensure that all team members are working on the latest version of the file.
Git |
GitHub |
Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files. The main point of Git is to manage projects, or a set of them when changes are made over time. It helps to track progress over time and coordinate work among several people on a project. |
GitHub is a Git repository hosting service that provides a web-based graphical interface. GitHub helps every team member to work together on the project from anywhere, making collaboration easy. |
Git repository refers to a place where all the Git files are stored. These files can either be stored on the local repository or on the remote repository.
If you want to initialize an empty repository to a directory in Git, you need to enter the git init command. After this command, a hidden .git folder will appear in the folder.
Git is a fast and reliable version control system, and the language that makes this possible is ‘C.’
Using C language reduces the overhead of run times, which are common in high-level languages.
The commit command is executed in a Git project to record the progress in the local repository. The commit command is executed only after the files to be committed have been added to the staging area using the git add command.
The command that makes it possible to write a commit message is ‘git commit -m’.
After having gone through the beginner’s level of Git interview questions, let us now level up to the following intermediate questions and answers.
The Git push command is used to push the content in a local repository to a remote repository. After a local repository has been modified, a push is executed to share the modifications with remote team members.
Git pull is used to fetch and merge changes from the remote repository to the local repository. Git pull is a combination of two commands: git fetch; followed by git merge.
Git fetch |
Git pull |
Command - git fetch origin git fetch –-all |
Command - git pull origin master |
A merge conflict is an event that takes place when Git is unable to resolve differences in code between the two commits automatically.
Git is able to automatically merge the changes only if the commits are on different lines or branches.
To resolve a merge conflict in Git, follow these steps:
There are two processes through which you can revert a commit:
1. Remove or fix the bad file in a new commit and push it to the remote repository. Then commit it to the remote repository using:
git commit –m “commit message”
2. Create a new commit to undo all the changes that were made in the bad commit. Use the following command:
git revert <commit id>
Using a standard way |
Using a bare way |
|
|
Let’s say you're a developer and you want to switch branches to work on something else. The issue is you don’t want to make commits in uncompleted work, so you just want to get back to this point later. The solution here is the Git stash.
Git stash takes your modified tracked files and saves it on a stack of unfinished changes that you can reapply at any time. To go back to the work you can use the stash pop.
git reset --mixed is used to undo changes made in the working directory and staging area.
git merge --abort helps stop the merge process and return back to the state before the merging began.
The command to get a list of files that has been changed in a particular commit is:
git diff-tree –r {commit hash}
Now let’s increase the level of difficulty with advanced Git interview questions and answers.
Interested to learn more about Git? Check out the DevOps Engineer Master's Program and get certified today.
There are two stages when a merge can enter a conflicted stage.
1. Starting the merge process
2. During the merge process
Fork |
Branch |
Clone |
The fork is the process when a copy of the repository is made. It's usually experimentation in the project without affecting the original project. They’re used to advise changes or take inspiration from someone else’s project. |
Git branches refer to individual projects within a git repository. If there are several branches in a repository, then each branch can have entirely different files and folders. |
Git clone refers to creating a clone or a copy of an existing git repository in a new directory. Cloning automatically creates a connection that points back to the original repository, which makes it very easy to interact with the central repository. |
To incorporate new commits into your feature branch, you use merge
As an alternative to merging, you can rebase the feature branch into master.
To fix a broken commit in Git, you may use the “git commit --amend” command, which helps you combine the staged changes with the previous commits instead of creating an entirely new commit.
git remote |
git clone |
git remote enables you to create, view, and delete connections to other repositories. It's used to refer to a remote repository or a central repository. |
git clone enables you to create a clone or copy of the target repository. It's used to target a different already existing repository. |
The Git stash drop command is used to remove a particular stash. If there’s a stash you're no longer using or you want to remove a specific item of stash from the list, you can use the stash commands.
Let’s say you want to delete an item named stash@{abc}; you can use the command git stash drop stash@{abc}.
The files that were stashed and saved in the stash index can be recovered. The files that were untracked will be lost. That’s why it's a good idea to stage and commit your work or stash them.
Reverting |
Resetting |
The revert command in Git is used to create a new commit that undoes the changes made in the previous commit. When you use this command, a new history is added to the project; the existing history is not modified. |
Git reset is a command that is used to undo the local changes that have been made to a Git repository. Git reset operates on the following: commit history, the staging index, and the working directory. |
There are two commands to determine these two different things.
The command git cherry-pick enables you to pick up commits from a branch within a repository and apply it to another branch. This command is useful to undo changes when any commit is accidentally made to the wrong branch. Then, you can switch to the correct branch and use this command to cherry-pick the commit.
By now you should have an idea of the Git questions that could be asked and what possible answers should be given.
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