How to get commit history for just one branch

Question

Let s say I created a new branch my experiment from  master and made several commits to my experiment  If I do a git log when on my experiment  I see the commits made to this branch  but also the commits made to master before the my experiments branch was created   I would find it very useful to see the history of all commits to the my experiments branch until it hits the creation of that branch - effectively a true history of just that branch  Otherwise it s not clear to me when looking through the log whether the commits were on the my experiments branch or not   Is there a way to do this with Git

User · Accepted Answer

You can use a range to do that   git log master     If you ve checked out your my experiment branch  This will compare where master is at to HEAD  the tip of my experiment

User · Answer

The git merge-base command can be used to find a common ancestor   So if my experiment has not been merged into master yet and my experiment was created from master you could   git log --oneline  git merge-base my experiment master   my experiment

User · Answer

Note  if you limit that log to the last n commit  last 3 commits for instance  git log -3   make sure to put a space between  n  and your branch   git log -3 master     Before Git 2 1  August 2014   this mistake  git log -3master   would actually show you the last 3 commits of the current branch  here my experiment   ignoring the master limit  meaning if my experiment contains only one commit  3 would still be listed  2 of them from master   See commit e3fa568 by  Junio C Hamano  gitster    revision  parse  git log - lt count gt   more carefully     This mistyped command line simply ignores  master  and ends up showing two commits from the current HEAD      git log -2master      because we feed  2master  to atoi   without making sure that the whole string is parsed as an integer       Use the strtol i   helper function instead

User · Answer

I know it s very late for this one    But here is a  not so simple  oneliner to get what you were looking for   git show-branch --all 2 gt  dev null   grep -E      git branch   grep -E         awk    printf  2        tail -n 2   sed -E  s                   We are listing commits with branch name and relative positions to actual branch states with git show-branch  sending the warnings to  dev null   Then we only keep those with our branch name inside the bracket with grep -E     BRANCH NAME   Where actual  BRANCH NAME is obtained with git branch   grep -E         awk    printf  2     the branch with a star  echoed without that star   From our results  we remove the redundant line at the beginning with tail -n 2  And then  we fianlly clean up the output by removing everything preceding   BRANCH NAME  with sed -E  s

User · Answer

I think an option for your purposes is git log --online --decorate  This lets you know the checked commit  and the top commits for each branch that you have in your story line  By doing this  you have a nice view on the structure of your repo and the commits associated to a specific branch  I think reading this might help

User · Answer

You can use only git log --oneline

[git] How to get commit history for just one branch?

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-log