Git, finding abandoned commits...

So, as many of you may know I recently took a position heading up a new software engineering team that is responsible for producing the new products. One of my first actions when I came on board was switching my team over from SVN to Git. One of the engineers on the team abandoned a branch in one of our Git repositories because he didn't think he would need it anymore. Soon, after he realized that he wanted something from that branch but now he couldn't see the brach anymore in 'gitk --all' or any of the other tools because he abandoned it. But, it has to still be there right, it is Git.

I knew there was a way to do this in Git and I have done it in the past but I couldn't remember how. After I explained a bit more to him about the internals of Git and he went off and did some exploration he came back to me with his found solution which follows:

git fsck --unreachable| cut -f3 -d' '|xargs git rev-list --header|less

I know there is some other way to find abandoned nodes in Git but I still can't remember. Anyways, just figured I would share this method in the hopes that it would help someone out there. It may not be exactly what you want with respect to the 'cut' or 'xargs' but I will let you all play with it a bit to get exactly what you want.