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 ...