Better way of getting a GIT commit message by short hash?

git log takes (among other things):

• -n num to limit the number of commits shown: choose 1 (and if num is 9 or less you can just write -num, hence, -1, for short)
• --pretty=format:string with directives to change the log output format. The %s directive gets the commit “subject”, which is what you also get with oneline.

Hence: git log -n 1 --pretty=format:%s $hash (or git log -1 --pretty=format:%s) will do the trick here.

For a complete list of format directives, see the git log documentation, under “PRETTY FORMATS” (about halfway down).