git-log(1)

NAME#

git-log - Show commit logs

SYNOPSIS#

git log\n [<options>] [<revision-range>] [[--] <path>...]

DESCRIPTION#

Shows the commit logs.

List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s) given with a ^ in front of them. The output is given in reverse chronological order by default.

You can think of this as a set operation. Commits reachable from any of the commits given on the command line form a set, and then commits reachable from any of the ones given with ^ in front are subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the command’s output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used to further limit the result.

Thus, the following command:

$ git log foo bar ^baz

means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar, but not from baz".

A special notation "<commit1>..<commit2>" can be used as a short-hand for "^<commit1><commit2>". For example, either of the following may be used interchangeably:

$ git log origin..HEAD
$ git log HEAD ^origin

Another special notation is "<commit1>...<commit2>" which is useful for merges. The resulting set of commits is the symmetric difference between the two operands. The following two commands are equivalent:

$ git log A B --not $(git merge-base --all A B)
$ git log A...B

The command takes options applicable to the git-rev-list(1) command to control what is shown and how, and options applicable to the git-diff(1) command to control how the changes each commit introduces are shown.

OPTIONS#

--follow

--no-decorate, --decorate[=short|full|auto|no]

--decorate-refs=<pattern>, --decorate-refs-exclude=<pattern>

If none of these options or config settings are given, then references are used as decoration if they match HEAD, refs/heads/, refs/remotes/, refs/stash/, or refs/tags/.

--clear-decorations

--source

--[no-]mailmap, --[no-]use-mailmap

--full-diff

Note that this affects all diff-based output types, e.g. those produced by --stat, etc.

--log-size

-L<start>,<end>:<file>, -L:<funcname>:<file>

<start> and <end> can take one of these forms:

If <start> or <end> is a number, it specifies an absolute line number (lines count from 1).

This form will use the first line matching the given POSIX regex. If <start> is a regex, it will search from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. If <start> is ^/regex/, it will search from the start of file. If <end> is a regex, it will search starting at the line given by <start>.

This is only valid for <end> and will specify a number of lines before or after the line given by <start>.

If :<funcname> is given in place of <start> and <end>, it is a regular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname line that matches <funcname>, up to the next funcname line. :<funcname> searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. ^:<funcname> searches from the start of file. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in gitattributes(5)).

<revision-range>

[--] <path>...

Paths may need to be prefixed with -- to separate them from options or the revision range, when confusion arises.

Commit Limiting#

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied.

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. --since=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using it with --grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as --reverse.

-<number>, -n <number>, --max-count=<number>

--skip=<number>

--since=<date>, --after=<date>

--since-as-filter=<date>

--until=<date>, --before=<date>

--author=<pattern>, --committer=<pattern>

--grep-reflog=<pattern>

--grep=<pattern>

When --notes is in effect, the message from the notes is matched as if it were part of the log message.

--all-match

--invert-grep

-i, --regexp-ignore-case

--basic-regexp

-E, --extended-regexp

-F, --fixed-strings

-P, --perl-regexp

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn’t compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

--remove-empty

--merges

--no-merges

--min-parents=<number>, --max-parents=<number>, --no-min-parents, --no-max-parents

--no-min-parents and --no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit) again. Equivalent forms are --min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

--first-parent

This option also changes default diff format for merge commits to first-parent, see --diff-merges=first-parent for details.

--exclude-first-parent-only

--not

--all

--branches[=<pattern>]

--tags[=<pattern>]

--remotes[=<pattern>]

--glob=<glob-pattern>

--exclude=<glob-pattern>

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

--exclude-hidden=[fetch|receive|uploadpack]

--reflog

--alternate-refs

--single-worktree

--ignore-missing

--bisect

--stdin

--cherry-mark

--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 (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it 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.

--left-only, --right-only

For example, --cherry-pick --right-only A...B omits those commits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More precisely, --cherry-pick --right-only --no-merges gives the exact list.

--cherry

-g, --walk-reflogs

With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shown as ref@{<Nth>} (where <Nth> is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as ref@{<timestamp>} (with the <timestamp> for that entry), depending on a few rules:

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).

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

--merge

--boundary

History Simplification#

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

--show-pulls

--full-history

--dense

--sparse

--simplify-merges

--ancestry-path[=<commit>]

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:

\n
          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
\n
         /     /   /   /   /   /
\n
        I     B   C   D   E   Y
\n
         \   /   /   /   /   /
\n
          `-------------'   X

The horizontal line of history A---Q is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are:

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:

\n
          .-A---N---O
\n
         /     /   /
\n
        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

\n
        I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. 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

\n
          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
\n
         /     /   /   /   /
\n
        I     B   /   D   /
\n
         \   /   /   /   /
\n
          `-------------'

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, and X, Y and Q.

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.

--simplify-merges

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules:

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to --full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

\n
          .-A---M---N---O
\n
         /     /       /
\n
        I     B       D
\n
         \   /       /
\n
          `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over --full-history:

There is another simplification mode available:

--ancestry-path[=<commit>]

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

\n
            D---E-------F
\n
           /     \       \
\n
          B---C---G---H---I---J
\n
         /                     \
\n
        A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that “what does M have that did not exist in D”. The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

\n
                E-------F
\n
                 \       \
\n
                  G---H---I---J
\n
                               \
\n
                                L--M

We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but is just more explicit.

If we instead are interested in a given topic within this range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for example would result in:

\n
                E
\n
                 \
\n
                  G---H---I---J
\n
                               \
\n
                                L--M

Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

\n
                K---------------L--M

Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create a new example history.

A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in the file’s simplified history. Let’s demonstrate a new example and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges works in that case:

\n
          .-A---M-----C--N---O---P
\n
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
\n
        I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /
\n
         \   /     \/         /
\n
          \ /      /\        /
\n
           `---X--'  `---Y--'

For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z, and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however, was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents, but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent, so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The resulting history graph is:

\n
        I---X

When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the resulting graph is:

\n
          .-A---M--------N---O---P
\n
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
\n
        I     B   \  R-'`--'   /
\n
         \   /     \/         /
\n
          \ /      /\        /
\n
           `---X--'  `------'

Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt. This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches along a single trunk: many unrelated merges appear in the --full-history results.

When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

\n
          .-A---M--.
\n
         /     /    \
\n
        I     B      R
\n
         \   /      /
\n
          \ /      /
\n
           `---X--'

In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared" from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit history before returning a single result. This can make the option difficult to use for very large repositories.

The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are working on the same repository, it is important which merge commits introduced a change into an important branch. The problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This commit may have information about why the change X came to override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

--show-pulls

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

\n
        I---X---R---N

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

\n
          .-A---M--.   N
\n
         /     /    \ /
\n
        I     B      R
\n
         \   /      /
\n
          \ /      /
\n
           `---X--'

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

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).

Commit Ordering#

By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.

--date-order

--author-date-order

--topo-order

For example, in a commit history like this:

\n
    ---1----2----4----7
\n
        \              \
\n
         3----5----6----8---

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git rev-list and friends with --date-order show the commits in the timestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

With --topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together.

--reverse

Object Traversal#

These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories.

--no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)]

--do-walk

Commit Formatting#

--pretty[=<format>], --format=<format>

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

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.

--no-abbrev-commit

--oneline

--encoding=<encoding>

--expand-tabs=<n>, --expand-tabs, --no-expand-tabs

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--notes[=<ref>]

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). See git-config(1) for more details.

With an optional <ref> argument, use the ref to find the notes to display. The ref can specify the full refname when it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form the full name of the ref.

Multiple --notes options can be combined to control which notes are being displayed. Examples: "--notes=foo" will show only notes from "refs/notes/foo"; "--notes=foo --notes" will show both notes from "refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).

--no-notes

--show-notes-by-default

--show-notes[=<ref>], --[no-]standard-notes

--show-signature

--relative-date

--date=<format>

--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time, e.g. “2 hours ago”. The -local option has no effect for --date=relative.

--date=local is an alias for --date=default-local.

--date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO 8601-like format. The differences to the strict ISO 8601 format are:

--date=iso-strict (or --date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps in strict ISO 8601 format.

--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, often found in email messages.

--date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

--date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

--date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not match the current time-zone, and doesn’t print the whole date if that matches (ie skip printing year for dates that are "this year", but also skip the whole date itself if it’s in the last few days and we can just say what weekday it was). For older dates the hour and minute is also omitted.

--date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -local has no effect.

--date=format:... feeds the format ... to your system strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale’s preferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list of format placeholders. When using -local, the correct syntax is --date=format-local:....

--date=default is the default format, and is based on ctime(3) output. It shows a single line with three-letter day of the week, three-letter month, day-of-month, hour-minute-seconds in "HH:MM:SS" format, followed by 4-digit year, plus timezone information, unless the local time zone is used, e.g. Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000.

--parents

--children

--left-right

For example, if you have this topology:

\n
             y---b---b  branch B
\n
            / \ /
\n
           /   .
\n
          /   / \
\n
         o---x---a---a  branch A

you would get an output like this:

\n
        $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B
\n
        >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
\n
        >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
\n
        <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
\n
        <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
\n
        -yyyyyyy... 1st on b
\n
        -xxxxxxx... 1st on a

--graph

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the --date-order option may also be specified.

--show-linear-break[=<barrier>]

PRETTY FORMATS#

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 hashes 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.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see git-config(1)). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

<hash> <title-line>

This is designed to be as compact as possible.

commit <hash>
Author: <author>

<title-line>

commit <hash>
Author: <author>
Date:   <author-date>

<title-line>

<full-commit-message>

commit <hash>
Author: <author>
Commit: <committer>

<title-line>

<full-commit-message>

commit <hash>
Author:     <author>
AuthorDate: <author-date>
Commit:     <committer>
CommitDate: <committer-date>

<title-line>

<full-commit-message>

<abbrev-hash> (<title-line>, <short-author-date>)

This format is used to refer to another commit in a commit message and is the same as --pretty='format:%C(auto)%h (%s, %ad)'. By default, the date is formatted with --date=short unless another --date option is explicitly specified. As with any format: with format placeholders, its output is not affected by other options like --decorate and --walk-reflogs.

From <hash> <date>
From: <author>
Date: <author-date>
Subject: [PATCH] <title-line>

<full-commit-message>

Like email, but lines in the commit message starting with "From " (preceded by zero or more ">") are quoted with ">" so they aren’t confused as starting a new commit.

The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in the commit object. Notably, the hashes are displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the true parent commits, without taking grafts or history simplification into account. Note that this format affects the way commits are displayed, but not the way the diff is shown e.g. with git log --raw. To get full object names in a raw diff format, use --no-abbrev.

The format:<format-string> 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:

%n

%%

%x00

%Cred

%Cgreen

%Cblue

%Creset

%C(...)

%m

%w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])

%<( <N> [,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])

%<|( <M> )

%>( <N> ), %>|( <M> )

%>>( <N> ), %>>|( <M> )

%><( <N> ), %><|( <M> )

%H

%h

%T

%t

%P

%p

%an

%aN

%ae

%aE

%al

%aL

%ad

%aD

%ar

%at

%ai

%aI

%as

%ah

%cn

%cN

%ce

%cE

%cl

%cL

%cd

%cD

%cr

%ct

%ci

%cI

%cs

%ch

%d

%D

%(decorate[:<options>])

For example, to produce decorations with no wrapping or tag annotations, and spaces as separators:

%(decorate:prefix=,suffix=,tag=,separator= )

%(describe[:<options>])

%S

%e

%s

%f

%b

%B

%N

%GG

%G?

%GS

%GK

%GF

%GP

%GT

%gD

%gd

%gn

%gN

%ge

%gE

%gs

%(trailers[:<options>])

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d and %D placeholders will use the "short" decoration format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

The boolean options accept an optional value [=<bool-value>]. The values true, false, on, off etc. are all accepted. See the "boolean" sub-section in "EXAMPLES" in git-config(1). If a boolean option is given with no value, it’s enabled.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all consecutive line-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

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 \
\n
  | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
4da45be
7134973 -- NO NEWLINE
$ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
\n
  | 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

DIFF FORMATTING#

By default, git log does not generate any diff output. The options below can be used to show the changes made by each commit.

Note that unless one of --diff-merges variants (including short -m, -c, --cc, and --dd options) is explicitly given, merge commits will not show a diff, even if a diff format like --patch is selected, nor will they match search options like -S. The exception is when --first-parent is in use, in which case first-parent is the default format for merge commits.

-p, -u, --patch

-s, --no-patch

-m

-c

--cc

--dd

--remerge-diff

--no-diff-merges

--diff-merges=<format>

The following formats are supported:

off, none

on, m

first-parent, 1

separate

combined, c

dense-combined, cc

remerge, r

The output emitted when this option is used is subject to change, and so is its interaction with other options (unless explicitly documented).

--combined-all-paths

-U<n>, --unified=<n>

--output=<file>

--output-indicator-new=<char>, --output-indicator-old=<char>, --output-indicator-context=<char>

--raw

--patch-with-raw

-t

--indent-heuristic

--no-indent-heuristic

--minimal

--patience

--histogram

--anchored=<text>

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with this text, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm={patience|minimal|histogram|myers}

default, myers

minimal

patience

histogram

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary

--numstat

--shortstat

-X[<param1,param2,...>], --dirstat[=<param1,param2,...>]

changes

lines

files

cumulative

<limit>

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative

--dirstat-by-file[=<param1,param2>...]

--summary

--patch-with-stat

-z

Also, when --raw or --numstat has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see git-config(1)).

--name-only

--name-status

--submodule[=<format>]

--color[=<when>]

--no-color

--color-moved[=<mode>]

no

default

plain

blocks

zebra

dimmed-zebra

--no-color-moved

--color-moved-ws=<modes>

no

ignore-space-at-eol

ignore-space-change

ignore-all-space

allow-indentation-change

--no-color-moved-ws

--word-diff[=<mode>]

color

plain

porcelain

none

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

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.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see gitattributes(5) or git-config(1). Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]

--no-renames

--[no-]rename-empty

--check

--ws-error-highlight=<kind>

--full-index

--binary

--abbrev[=<n>]

-B[<n>][/<m>], --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number m controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number n controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file’s size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>], --find-renames[=<n>]

-C[<n>], --find-copies[=<n>]

--find-copies-harder

-D, --irreversible-delete

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>

--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

It is useful when you’re looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in gitdiffcore(7) for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all

--pickaxe-regex

-O<orderfile>

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file>, --rotate-to=<file>

-R

--relative[=<path>], --no-relative

-a, --text

--ignore-cr-at-eol

--ignore-space-at-eol

-b, --ignore-space-change

-w, --ignore-all-space

--ignore-blank-lines

-I<regex>, --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>

--inter-hunk-context=<lines>

-W, --function-context

--ext-diff

--no-ext-diff

--textconv, --no-textconv

--ignore-submodules[=<when>]

--src-prefix=<prefix>

--dst-prefix=<prefix>

--no-prefix

--default-prefix

--line-prefix=<prefix>

--ita-invisible-in-index

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also gitdiffcore(7).

GENERATING PATCH TEXT WITH -P#

Running git-diff(1), git-log(1), git-show(1), git-diff-index(1), git-diff-tree(1), or git-diff-files(1) with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see git(1)), and the diff attribute (see gitattributes(5)).

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 the a/ or b/ filenames.

When a 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 the 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>

File modes are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

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.

The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

diff --git a/a b/b
rename from a
rename to b
diff --git a/b b/a
rename from b
rename to a

COMBINED DIFF FORMAT#

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with git-diff(1) or git-show(1). Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific 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 @@@
\n
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
\n
  }
- static void describe(char *arg)
\n
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
\n
  {
\n
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
\n
 +      struct commit *cmit;
\n
        struct commit_list *list;
\n
        static int initialized = 0;
\n
        struct commit_name *n;
\n
 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
\n
 +              usage(describe_usage);
\n
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
\n
 +      if (!cmit)
\n
 +              usage(describe_usage);
\n
 +
\n
        if (!initialized) {
\n
                initialized = 1;
\n
                for_each_ref(get_name);

diff --combined file

or like this (when the --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 content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

--- a/file
+++ b/file

Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

--- a/file
--- a/file
--- a/file
+++ b/file

This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

@@@ <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 X’s 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 or 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").

EXAMPLES#

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

git log --branches --not --remotes=origin

git log master --not --remotes=*/master

git log -p -m --first-parent

git log -L '/int main/',/^}/:main.c

git log -3

DISCUSSION#

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

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.

[i18n]
\n
        commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitEncoding in their 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.

[i18n]
\n
        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.

CONFIGURATION#

See git-config(1) for core variables and git-diff(1) for settings related to diff generation.

format.pretty

i18n.logOutputEncoding

Everything above this line in this section isn’t included from the git-config(1) documentation. The content that follows is the same as what’s found there:

log.abbrevCommit

log.date

If the format is set to "auto:foo" and the pager is in use, format "foo" will be used for the date format. Otherwise, "default" will be used.

log.decorate

log.initialDecorationSet

log.excludeDecoration

log.diffMerges

log.follow

log.graphColors

log.showRoot

log.showSignature

log.mailmap

notes.mergeStrategy

This setting can be overridden by passing the --strategy option to git-notes(1).

notes.<name>.mergeStrategy

notes.displayRef

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

This setting can be disabled by the --no-notes option to the git log family of commands, or by the --notes=<ref> option accepted by those commands.

The effective value of "core.notesRef" (possibly overridden by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of refs to be displayed.

notes.rewrite.<command>

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

notes.rewriteMode

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

notes.rewriteRef

Does not have a default value; you must configure this variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit notes.

Can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable. See notes.rewrite.<command> above for a further description of its format.

GIT#

Part of the git(1) suite