Git copy file preserving history

Question

I have a somewhat confusing question in Git  Lets say  I have a file dir1 A txt committed and git preserves a history of commits Now I need to copy the file into dir2 A txt  not move  but copy   I know that there is a git mv command but I need dir2 A txt to have the same history of commits as dir1 A txt  and dir1 A txt to still remain there  I m not planning to update A txt once the copy is created and all the future work will be done on dir2 A txt I know it sounds confusing  I ll add that this situation is on java based module  mavenized project  and we need to create a new version of code so that our customers will have the ability to have 2 different versions in runtime  the first version will be removed eventually when the alignment will be done  We can use maven versioning of course  I m just newbie to Git and curious about what Git can provide here

User · Answer

Simply copy the file  add and commit it   cp dir1 A txt dir2 A txt git add dir2 A txt git commit -m  Duplicated file from dir1  to dir2     Then the following commands will show the full pre-copy history   git log --follow dir2 A txt   To see inherited line-by-line annotations from the original file use this   git blame -C -C -C dir2 A txt   Git does not track copies at commit-time  instead it detects them when inspecting history with e g  git blame and git log   Most of this information comes from the answers here  Record file copy operation with Git

User · Answer

This process preserve history  but is little workarround     make branchs to new files    git mv arquivos  amp  amp  git commit    in original branch  remove original files    git rm arquivos  amp  amp  git commit    do merge and fix conflicts    git merge branch-copia-arquivos    back to original branch and revert commit removing files    git revert commit

User · Answer

Unlike subversion  git does not have a per-file history  If you look at the commit data structure  it only points to the previous commits and the new tree object for this commit  No explicit information is stored in the commit object which files are changed by the commit  nor the nature of these changes   The tools to inspect changes can detect renames based on heuristics  E g   git diff  has the option -M that turns on rename detection  So in case of a rename   git diff  might show you that one file has been deleted and another one created  while  git diff -M  will actually detect the move and display the change accordingly  see  man git diff  for details    So in git this is not a matter of how you commit your changes but how you look at the committed changes later

User · Answer

For completeness  I would add that  if you wanted to copy an entire directory full of controlled AND uncontrolled files  you could use the following   git mv old new git checkout HEAD old   The uncontrolled files will be copied over  so you should clean them up   git clean -fdx new

User · Answer

All you have to do is    move the file to two different locations  merge the two commits that do the above  and  move one copy back to the original location    You will be able to see historical attributions  using git blame  and full history of changes  using git log  for both files   Suppose you want to create a copy of file foo called bar  In that case the workflow you d use would look like this   git mv foo bar git commit  SAVED  git rev-parse HEAD  git reset --hard HEAD  git mv foo copy git commit  git merge  SAVED       This will generate conflicts git commit -a          Trivially resolved like this  git mv copy foo git commit   Why this works  After you execute the above commands  you end up with a revision history that looks like this     revision history                files        ORIG HEAD                      foo                                         SAVED       ALTERNATE          bar     copy                                               MERGED                     bar copy                                            RESTORED                    bar foo   When you ask Git about the history of foo  it will    detect the rename from copy between MERGED and RESTORED  detect that copy came from the ALTERNATE parent of MERGED  and detect the rename from foo between ORIG HEAD and ALTERNATE    From there it will dig into the history of foo   When you ask Git about the history of bar  it will    notice no change between MERGED and RESTORED  detect that bar came from the SAVED parent of MERGED  and  detect the rename from foo between ORIG HEAD and SAVED    From there it will dig into the history of foo   It s that simple      You just need to force Git into a merge situation where you can accept two traceable copies of the file s   and we do this with a parallel move of the original  which we soon revert

User · Answer

In my case  I made the change on my hard drive  cut pasted about 200 folders files from one path in my working copy to another path in my working copy   and used SourceTree  2 0 20 1  to stage both the detected changes  one add  one remove   and as long as I staged both the add and remove together  it automatically combined into a single change with a pink R icon  rename I assume     I did notice that because I had such a large number of changes at once  SourceTree was a little slow detecting all the changes  so some of my staged files look like just adds  green plus  or just deletes  red minus   but I kept refreshing the file status and kept staging new changes as they eventually popped up  and after a few minutes  the whole list was perfect and ready for commit   I verified that the history is present  as long as when I look for history  I check the  Follow renamed files  option

User · Answer

I ve slightly modified Peter s answer here to create a reusable  non-interactive shell script called git-split sh      bin sh  if       -ne 2      then   echo  Usage  git-split sh original copy    exit 0 fi  git mv   1    2  git commit -n -m  Split history  1 to  2 - rename file to target-name  REV  git rev-parse HEAD  git reset --hard HEAD  git mv   1  temp git commit -n -m  Split history  1 to  2 - rename source-file to temp  git merge  REV git commit -a -n -m  Split history  1 to  2 - resolve conflict and keep both files  git mv temp   1  git commit -n -m  Split history  1 to  2 - restore name of source-file

[git] Git copy file preserving history

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