Show history of a file

Question

Possible Duplicate    View the change history of a file using Git versioning       Sometimes I want to step through the history of a particular file  In the past I used P4V and this was very quick and intuitive     Right click on a file and select history  Scrolling through the dates and see a nice diff of exactly what changed in that file on that date  Simple    Switching to git this is now a grueling task      git log filename  Look at history and pick a date  copy hash  git diff hash  Scroll through diff for the stuff that changed in the file I am interested in  Nope  that s not it  lets try a different date - back to step 2  rinse and repeat    I ve searched SO  and I ve tried a few of the commonly suggested guis  github  gitk  gitg  git-gui   These all remove the need to manually run commands  but the workflow is the same for this  View history of file  view commit  search through diff of lots of irrelevant files  It s slow and repetitive   All the data is in the repo so I see no reason this simple common use case could not be more streamlined   Can anyone recommend a tool that does this - or a more efficient way to utilize the command line to do what I want   Thanks for any suggestions

User · Accepted Answer

Have you tried this   gitk path to file

User · Answer

You can use git log to display the diffs while searching   git log -p -- path to file

User · Answer

git log -p will generate the a patch  the diff  for every commit selected  For a single file  use git log --follow -p  file   If you re looking for a particular change  use git bisect to find the change in log n  views by splitting the number of commits in half until you find where what you re looking for changed   Also consider looking back in history using git blame to follow changes to the line in question if you know what that is  This command shows the most recent revision to affect a certain line  You may have to go back a few versions to find the first change where something was introduced if somebody has tweaked it over time  but that could give you a good start   Finally  gitk as a GUI does show me the patch immediately for any commit I click on    Example

User · Answer

The main question for me would be  what are you actually trying to find out  Are you trying to find out  when a certain set of changes was introduced in that file    You can use git blame for this  it will anotate each line with a SHA1 and a date when it was changed  git blame can also tell you when a certain line was deleted or where it was moved if you are interested in that   If you are trying to find out  when a certain bug was introduced  git bisect is a very powerfull tool  git bisect will do a binary search on your history  You can use git bisect start to start bisecting  then git bisect bad to mark a commit where the bug is present and git bisect good to mark a commit which does not have the bug  git will checkout a commit between the two and ask you if it is good or bad  You can usually find the faulty commit within a few steps   Since I have used git  I hardly ever found the need to manually look through patch histories to find something  since most often git offers me a way to actually look for the information I need   If you try to think less of how to do a certain workflow  but more in what information you need  you will probably many workflows which  in my opinion  are much more simple and faster

[git] Show history of a file?

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