I’d like to get the number of commits of my git repository, a bit like SVN revision numbers.
The goal is to use it as a unique, incrementing build number.

I currently do like that, on Unix/Cygwin/msysGit:

git log --pretty=format:'' | wc -l

But I feel it’s a bit of a hack.

Is there a better way to do that?
It would be cool if I actually didn’t need wc or even git, so it could work on a bare Windows. Just read a file or a directory structure …

Solution:

If you’re looking for a unique and still quite readable identifier for commits, git describe might be just the thing for you.