git log [<options>] [<since>..<until>] [[--] <path>...]
Shows the commit logs.
The command takes options applicable to the git-rev-list command to control what is shown and how, and options applicable to the git-diff-* commands to control how the changes each commit introduces are shown.
-p, -u
-U<n>, --unified=<n>
--raw
--patch-with-raw
--patience
--stat[=width[,name-width]]
--numstat
--shortstat
--dirstat[=limit]
--dirstat-by-file[=limit]
--summary
--patch-with-stat
-z
--name-only
--name-status
--color
--no-color
--color-words[=<regex>]
When a <regex> is specified, every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.
The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see gitattributes(1) or git-config(1). Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.
--no-renames
--check
--full-index
--binary
--abbrev[=<n>]
-B
-M
-C
--diff-filter=[ACDMRTUXB*]
--find-copies-harder
-l<num>
-S<string>
--pickaxe-all
--pickaxe-regex
-O<orderfile>
-R
--relative[=<path>]
-a, --text
--ignore-space-at-eol
-b, --ignore-space-change
-w, --ignore-all-space
--inter-hunk-context=<lines>
--exit-code
--quiet
--ext-diff
--no-ext-diff
--ignore-submodules
--src-prefix=<prefix>
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
--no-prefix
For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also gitdiffcore(7).
-<n>
<since>..<until>
--decorate[=short|full]
--source
--full-diff
--follow
--log-size
[--] <path>...
--pretty[=<format>], --format[=<format>]
Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see git-config(1)).
--abbrev-commit
This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.
--oneline
--encoding[=<encoding>]
--relative-date
--date={relative,local,default,iso,rfc,short,raw}
--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time, e.g. "2 hours ago".
--date=local shows timestamps in usercqs local timezone.
--date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in ISO 8601 format.
--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, often found in E-mail messages.
--date=short shows only date but not time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.
--date=raw shows the date in the internal raw git format %s %z format.
--date=default shows timestamps in the original timezone (either committercqs or authorcqs).
--parents
--children
--left-right
For example, if you have this topology:
y---b---b branch B
/ \ /
/ .
/ / \
o---x---a---a branch A
you would get an output like this:
$ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B
>bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
>bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
<aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
<aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
-yyyyyyy... 1st on b
-xxxxxxx... 1st on a
--graph
This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the --date-order option may also be specified.
Below are listed options that control the formatting of diff output. Some of them are specific to git-rev-list(1), however other diff options may be given. See git-diff-files(1) for more options.
-c
--cc
-r
-t
Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied.
-n number, --max-count=<number>
--skip=<number>
--since=<date>, --after=<date>
--until=<date>, --before=<date>
--author=<pattern>, --committer=<pattern>
--grep=<pattern>
--all-match
-i, --regexp-ignore-case
-E, --extended-regexp
-F, --fixed-strings
--remove-empty
--merges
--no-merges
--first-parent
--not
--all
--branches
--tags
--remotes
--cherry-pick
For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right, like the example above in the description of that option. It however shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, "3rd on b" may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.
-g, --walk-reflogs
With --pretty format other than oneline (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. By default, commit@{Nth} notation is used in the output. When the starting commit is specified as commit@{now}, output also uses commit@{timestamp} notation instead. Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also git-reflog(1).
--merge
--boundary
Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the commits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts of History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.
The following options select the commits to be shown:
<paths>
--simplify-by-decoration
Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.
The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:
Default mode
--full-history
--dense
--sparse
--simplify-merges
A more detailed explanation follows.
Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)
In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:
.-A---M---N---O---P
/ / / / /
I B C D E
\ / / / /
`-------------'
The horizontal line of history A---P is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are:
I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents "asdf", and a file quux exists with contents "quux". Initial commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.
B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial and hence TREESAME to all parents.
C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to "foobar", so it is not TREESAME to any parent.
D sets foo to "baz". Its merge O combines the strings from N and D to "foobarbaz"; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.
E changes quux to "xyzzy", and its merge P combines the strings to "quux xyzzy". Despite appearing interesting, P is TREESAME to all parents.
rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excluding commits based on whether --full-history and/or parent rewriting (via --parents or --children) are used. The following settings are available.
Default mode
This results in:
.-A---N---O
/ /
I---------D
Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.
Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.
--full-history without parent rewriting
I A B N D O
P and M were excluded because they are TREESAME to a parent. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear.
Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.
--full-history with parent rewriting
Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in
.-A---M---N---O---P
/ / / / /
I B / D /
\ / / / /
`-------------'
Compare to --full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N. Note also that P was included despite being TREESAME.
In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME affects inclusion:
--dense
--sparse
Note that without --full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.
Finally, there is a fourth simplification mode available:
--simplify-merges
Then simplify each commit oqC` to its replacement Ccq in the final history according to the following rules:
.-A---M---N---O
/ / /
I B D
\ / /
`---------'
Note the major differences in N and P over --full-history:
N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of the other parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME.
P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.
The --simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only the big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME (in other words, kept after history simplification rules described above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the contents of the paths given on the command line. All other commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).
By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.
--topo-order
--date-order
--reverse
These options are mostly targeted for packing of git repositories.
--objects
--objects-edge
--unpacked
--no-walk
--do-walk
If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the sha1s of ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for example, if you are only interested in changes related to a certain directory or file.
Here are some additional details for each format:
oneline
<sha1> <title line>
This is designed to be as compact as possible.
short
commit <sha1> Author: <author>
<title line>
medium
commit <sha1> Author: <author> Date: <author date>
<title line>
<full commit message>
full
commit <sha1> Author: <author> Commit: <committer>
<title line>
<full commit message>
fuller
commit <sha1> Author: <author> AuthorDate: <author date> Commit: <committer> CommitDate: <committer date>
<title line>
<full commit message>
From <sha1> <date> From: <author> Date: <author date> Subject: [PATCH] <title line>
<full commit message>
raw
The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in the commit object. Notably, the SHA1s are displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the true parent commits, without taking grafts nor history simplification into account.
format:
The format: format allows you to specify which information you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format, with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n instead of \n.
E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n" would show something like this:
The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<
The placeholders are:
%H: commit hash
%h: abbreviated commit hash
%T: tree hash
%t: abbreviated tree hash
%P: parent hashes
%p: abbreviated parent hashes
%an: author name
%aN: author name (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
%ae: author email
%aE: author email (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
%ad: author date (format respects --date= option)
%aD: author date, RFC2822 style
%ar: author date, relative
%at: author date, UNIX timestamp
%ai: author date, ISO 8601 format
%cn: committer name
%cN: committer name (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
%ce: committer email
%cE: committer email (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
%cd: committer date
%cD: committer date, RFC2822 style
%cr: committer date, relative
%ct: committer date, UNIX timestamp
%ci: committer date, ISO 8601 format
%d: ref names, like the --decorate option of git-log(1)
%e: encoding
%s: subject
%f: sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename
%b: body
%Cred: switch color to red
%Cgreen: switch color to green
%Cblue: switch color to blue
%Creset: reset color
%C(...): color specification, as described in color.branch.* config option
%m: left, right or boundary mark
%n: newline
%x00: print a byte from a hex code
tformat:
The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries. This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does. For example:
$ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \ | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/' 4da45be 7134973 -- NO NEWLINE $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \ | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/' 4da45be 7134973
In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it. For example, these two are equivalent:
$ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef $ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef
When "git-diff-index", "git-diff-tree", or "git-diff-files" are run with a -p option, "git diff" without the --raw option, or "git log" with the "-p" option, they do not produce the output described above; instead they produce a patch file. You can customize the creation of such patches via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables.
What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format.
diff --git a/file1 b/file2
The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of a/ or b/ filenames.
When rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that rename/copy produces, respectively.
old mode <mode> new mode <mode> deleted file mode <mode> new file mode <mode> copy from <path> copy to <path> rename from <path> rename to <path> similarity index <number> dissimilarity index <number> index <hash>..<hash> <mode>
The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.
"git-diff-tree", "git-diff-files" and "git-diff" can take -c or --cc option to produce combined diff. For showing a merge commit with "git log -p", this is the default format. A combined diff format looks like this:
diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
}
- static void describe(char *arg)
-static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
{
+ unsigned char sha1[20];
+ struct commit *cmit;
struct commit_list *list;
static int initialized = 0;
struct commit_name *n;
+ if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
+ usage(describe_usage);
+ cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
+ if (!cmit)
+ usage(describe_usage);
+
if (!initialized) {
initialized = 1;
for_each_ref(get_name);
diff --combined file
or like this (when --cc option is used):
diff --cc file
index <hash>,<hash>..<hash> mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> new file mode <mode> deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>
The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected contents movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.
--- a/file +++ b/file
Similar to two-line header for traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.
@@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@
There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.
Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus --- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus --- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space --- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,... with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how Xcqs line is different from it.
A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).
In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 nor file2). Also eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).
When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").
git log --no-merges
git log v2.6.12.. include/scsi drivers/scsi
git log --since="2 weeks ago" -- gitk
git log --name-status release..test
git log --follow builtin-rev-list.c
At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic.
Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.
git-commit and git-commit-tree issues a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitencoding in .git/config file, like this:
[i18n]
commitencoding = ISO-8859-1
Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitencoding in its encoding header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.
git-log, git-show, git-blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logoutputencoding in .git/config file, like this:
[i18n]
logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1
If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitencoding is used instead.
Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.
Written by Linus Torvalds <m[blue]torvalds@osdl.orgm[][1]>
Documentation by David Greaves, Junio C Hamano and the git-list <m[blue]git@vger.kernel.orgm[][2]>.
Part of the git(1) suite