Git treats lines starting with # (hash, number sign, octothorpe, pound sign) as comment lines when committing. This is very annoying when working with a ticket tracking system, and trying to write the ticket number at the beginning of the line, e.g.

#123 salt hashed passwords

Git will simply remove the line from the commit message. Is there a way to escape the hash? I tried \ and !, but nothing works. White space before # is preserved, so that's not a working solution to the problem either.

This behaviour is part of git commit's default 'clean-up' behaviour. If you want to keep lines starting with # you can use an alternative clean-up mode.

E.g.

git commit --cleanup=whitespace

If you do this you have to be careful to remove all # lines that you don't want to appear in the commit.