Prepare Git-Tracked Code for LLMs

When working with large language models (LLMs), it’s often useful to feed them the source code of a project for analysis, refactoring, or documentation assistance.

However, simply copying folders is messy — you usually only want the text files that are tracked by Git, displayed cleanly, without non-text files or noise.

To streamline this, I wrote a Bash script that:

Ensures you are inside a Git repository.
Lists all Git-tracked files.
Filters out non-text files.
Skips empty or unreadable files.
Prints the content of each file, with a clean header showing the relative path.

Perfect for quickly preparing a project snapshot to paste into an LLM.

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash

# Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
# Treat unset variables as an error.
# Pipelines return status of the last command to exit with non-zero status,
# or zero if all commands exit successfully.
set -euo pipefail

# Requires GNU realpath (on macOS: brew install coreutils)

# Check if the current directory is inside a Git work tree
if ! git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree > /dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo "Error: This script must be run from within a Git repository." >&2
  exit 1
fi

# Function to process each file
process_file() {
    local file="$1"
    # Use realpath to ensure consistent relative paths
    local relative_path
    relative_path="$(realpath --relative-to="." "$file")"

    # Skip if file is not readable or is empty
    if [ ! -r "$file" ] || [ ! -s "$file" ]; then
        return
    fi

    # Use 'file' command to determine the mime type.
    # -b (--brief): Do not prepend filename to output lines.
    # Check if the mime type starts with "text/". If it DOES NOT, skip the file.
    if ! file -b --mime-type "$file" | grep -q '^text/'; then
        return
    fi

    printf "=== File: %s ===\n\n" "$relative_path"
    cat "$file"
    printf "\n\n"
}

# Main script logic
main() {
    while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
        process_file "$file"
    done < <(git ls-files -z)
}

# Run the main function
main

exit 0

Notes

realpath is used for clean relative paths (you may need GNU coreutils on some systems).
File type detection is based on MIME type, not extensions.
The script uses strict error handling (set -euo pipefail) to avoid partial outputs or silent failures.

This tool has made working with LLMs much smoother when I need to expose full project contexts without manual cleanup.

Feel free to adapt it to your own workflow.

Notes#

Notes