Batch Pull All Your Local Git Repositories with a One‑Liner Script

Keeping dozens of local Git repositories up to date manually is time‑consuming; the article presents a compact shell pipeline that automatically finds each repository and runs git pull for you.

The core command is:

find . -maxdepth 3 -name .git -type d | rev | cut -c 6- | rev | xargs -I {} git -C {} pull

It works in three stages:

Locate all .git folders

The find part searches the current directory (and up to three sub‑levels) for directories named .git:

find . -maxdepth 3 -name .git -type d

.

– start from the current directory -maxdepth 3 – descend at most three directory levels -name .git – match entries named

.git

-type d

– restrict matches to directories

Trim the trailing .git from each path

The pipeline rev | cut -c 6- | rev reverses each path string, removes the first six characters (the reversed .git), and reverses the result back, leaving only the repository’s root directory.

... | rev | cut -c 6- | rev | ...

rev

– reverse the string cut -c 6- – drop the first six characters (the reversed .git) rev – reverse again to restore the original order

Run git pull in each repository

Because git does not accept a directory argument directly, xargs feeds each trimmed path to git -C {path} pull: xargs -I {} git -C {} pull This effectively executes git pull inside every discovered repository.

Convenient alias

To avoid typing the long pipeline each time, add the following alias to .zshrc or .bash_profile:

alias gpall="find . -maxdepth 3 -name .git -type d | rev | cut -c 6- | rev | xargs -I {} git -C {} pull"

After reloading the shell, simply run gpall to update all repositories at once.

References

Updating Multiple Repos With One Command

xargs command tutorial