We've already seen how to use git log to compare branches,
by looking at the commits on one branch that are not reachable from another.
(If you don't remember, it looks like this: git log branchA ^branchB).
However, you can also use git log to look for specific commits.
Here we'll be looking at some of the more commonly used git log
options, but there are many. Take a look at the official docs for the whole
list.
git log --author
look for only commits from a specific author
To filter your commit history to only the ones done by a specific author,
you can use the --author option. For example, let's say we're
looking for the commits in the Git source code done by Linus. We would
type something like git log --author=Linus. The search is
case sensitive and also will search the email address. I'll do the
example using the -[number] option, which will limit the
results to the last [number] commits.
$ git log --author=Linus --oneline -5
81b50f3 Move 'builtin-*' into a 'builtin/' subdirectory
3bb7256 make "index-pack" a built-in
377d027 make "git pack-redundant" a built-in
b532581 make "git unpack-file" a built-in
112dd51 make "mktag" a built-in
git log --since --before
filter commits by date authored
If you want to specify a date range that you're interested in filtering your
commits down to, you can use a number of options - I use --since
and --before, but you can also use --until and
--after. For example, if I wanted to see all the commits in
the Git project before 3 weeks ago but after April 18th, I could run this
(I'm also going to use --no-merges to remove merge commits):
$ git log --oneline --before={3.weeks.ago} --after={2010-04-18} --no-merges
5469e2d Git 1.7.1-rc2
d43427d Documentation/remote-helpers: Fix typos and improve language
272a36b Fixup: Second argument may be any arbitrary string
b6c8d2d Documentation/remote-helpers: Add invocation section
5ce4f4e Documentation/urls: Rewrite to accomodate transport::address
00b84e9 Documentation/remote-helpers: Rewrite description
03aa87e Documentation: Describe other situations where -z affects git diff
77bc694 rebase-interactive: silence warning when no commits rewritten
636db2c t3301: add tests to use --format="%N"
git log --grep
filter commits by commit message
You may also want to look for commits with a certain phrase in the commit
message. You can use --grep for that. Let's say I knew there
was a commit that dealt with using the P4EDITOR environment variable and
I wanted to remember what that change looked like - I could find the commit
with --grep.
$ git log --grep=P4EDITOR --no-merges
commit 82cea9ffb1c4677155e3e2996d76542502611370
Author: Shawn Bohrer
Date: Wed Mar 12 19:03:24 2008 -0500
git-p4: Use P4EDITOR environment variable when set
Perforce allows you to set the P4EDITOR environment variable to your
preferred editor for use in perforce. Since we are displaying a
perforce changelog to the user we should use it when it is defined.
Signed-off-by: Shawn Bohrer
Signed-off-by: Simon Hausmann
Git will logically OR all --grep and --author
arguments. If you want to use --grep and --author
to see commits that were authored by someone AND have a specific message
content, you have to add the --all-match option. In these
examples, I'm going to use the --format option, so we can see
who the author of each commit was.
If I look for the commit messages with 'p4 depo' in them, I get these
three commits:
$ git log --grep="p4 depo" --format="%h %an %s"
ee4fd1a Junio C Hamano Merge branch 'master' of git://repo.or.cz/git/fastimport
da4a660 Benjamin Sergeant git-p4 fails when cloning a p4 depo.
1cd5738 Simon Hausmann Make incremental imports easier to use by storing the p4 d
If I add a --author=Hausmann argument, instead of further
filtering it down to the one commit by Simon, it instead will show me all
commits by Simon OR commits with "p4 depo" in the message:
$ git log --grep="p4 depo" --format="%h %an %s" --author="Hausmann"
cdc7e38 Simon Hausmann Make it possible to abort the submission of a change to Pe
f5f7e4a Simon Hausmann Clean up the git-p4 documentation
30b5940 Simon Hausmann git-p4: Fix import of changesets with file deletions
4c750c0 Simon Hausmann git-p4: git-p4 submit cleanups.
0e36f2d Simon Hausmann git-p4: Removed git-p4 submit --direct.
edae1e2 Simon Hausmann git-p4: Clean up git-p4 submit's log message handling.
4b61b5c Simon Hausmann git-p4: Remove --log-substitutions feature.
36ee4ee Simon Hausmann git-p4: Ensure the working directory and the index are cle
e96e400 Simon Hausmann git-p4: Fix submit user-interface.
38f9f5e Simon Hausmann git-p4: Fix direct import from perforce after fetching cha
2094714 Simon Hausmann git-p4: When skipping a patch as part of "git-p4 submit" m
1ca3d71 Simon Hausmann git-p4: Added support for automatically importing newly ap
...
However, if I add a --all-match, I get the results I'm
looking for:
$ git log --grep="p4 depo" --format="%h %an %s" --author="Hausmann" --all-match
1cd5738 Simon Hausmann Make incremental imports easier to use by storing the p4 d
git log -S
filter by introduced diff
What if you write really horrible commit messages? Or, what if you are
looking for when a function was introduced, or where variables started
to be used? You can also tell Git to look through the diff of each
commit for a string. For example, if we wanted to find which commits
modified anything that looked like the function name
'userformat_find_requirements', we would run this: (note there is no '='
between the '-S' and what you are searching for)
$ git log -Suserformat_find_requirements
commit 5b16360330822527eac1fa84131d185ff784c9fb
Author: Johannes Gilger
Date: Tue Apr 13 22:31:12 2010 +0200
pretty: Initialize notes if %N is used
When using git log --pretty='%N' without an explicit --show-notes, git
would segfault. This patches fixes this behaviour by loading the needed
notes datastructures if --pretty is used and the format contains %N.
When --pretty='%N' is used together with --no-notes, %N won't be
expanded.
This is an extension to a proposed patch by Jeff King.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Gilger
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano
git log -p
show patch introduced at each commit
Each commit is a snapshot of the project, but since each commit records the
snapshot it was based off of, Git can always calculate the difference and
show it to you as a patch. That means for any commit you can get the patch
that commit introduced to the project. You can either do this by running
git show [SHA] with a specific commit SHA, or you can run
git log -p, which tells Git to put the patch after each commit.
It is a great way to summarize what has happened on a branch or between
commits.
$ git log -p --no-merges -2
commit 594f90bdee4faf063ad07a4a6f503fdead3ef606
Author: Scott Chacon schacon@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 4 15:46:55 2010 +0200
reverted to old class name
diff --git a/ruby.rb b/ruby.rb
index bb86f00..192151c 100644
--- a/ruby.rb
+++ b/ruby.rb
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
-class HiWorld
+class HelloWorld
def self.hello
puts "Hello World from Ruby"
end
end
-HiWorld.hello
+HelloWorld.hello
commit 3cbb6aae5c0cbd711c098e113ae436801371c95e
Author: Scott Chacon schacon@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 4 12:58:53 2010 +0200
fixed readme title differently
diff --git a/README b/README
index d053cc8..9103e27 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-Hello World Examples
+Many Hello World Examples
======================
This project has examples of hello world in
This is a really nice way of summarizing changes or reviewing a series
of commits before merging them or releasing something.
git log --stat
show diffstat of changes introduced at each commit
If the -p option is too verbose for you, you can summarize
the changes with --stat instead. Here is the same log output
with --stat instead of -p
$ git log --stat --no-merges -2
commit 594f90bdee4faf063ad07a4a6f503fdead3ef606
Author: Scott Chacon schacon@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 4 15:46:55 2010 +0200
reverted to old class name
ruby.rb | 4 ++--
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
commit 3cbb6aae5c0cbd711c098e113ae436801371c95e
Author: Scott Chacon schacon@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 4 12:58:53 2010 +0200
fixed readme title differently
README | 2 +-
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
Same basic information, but a little more compact - it still lets you
see relative changes and which files were modified.