How to show first commit by git log

Question

I have a project which has long history  I want to show the first commit on git    How do I do this

User · Answer

git log --format   h    tail -1 gives you the commit hash  ie 0dd89fb   which you can feed into other commands  by doing something like   git diff  git log --format   h  --after  1 day   tail -1   HEAD to view all the commits in the last day

User · Answer

Short answer  git rev-list --max-parents 0 HEAD    from tiho s comment  As Chris Johnsen notices  --max-parents was introduced after this answer was posted    Explanation  Technically  there may be more than one root commit  This happens when multiple previously independent histories are merged together  It is common when a project is integrated via a subtree merge   The git git repository has six root commits in its history graph  one each for Linus   s initial commit  gitk  some initially separate tools  git-gui  gitweb  and git-p4   In this case  we know that e83c516 is the one we are probably interested in  It is both the earliest commit and a root commit   It is not so simple in the general case   Imagine that libfoo has been in development for a while and keeps its history in a Git repository  libfoo git   Independently  the    bar    project has also been under development  in bar git   but not for as long libfoo  the commit with the earliest date in libfoo git has a date that precedes the commit with the earliest date in bar git   At some point the developers of    bar    decide to incorporate libfoo into their project by using a subtree merge  Prior to this merge it might have been trivial to determine the    first    commit in bar git  there was probably only one root commit   After the merge  however  there are multiple root commits and the earliest root commit actually comes from the history of libfoo  not    bar      You can find all the root commits of the history DAG like this   git rev-list --max-parents 0 HEAD   For the record  if --max-parents weren t available  this does also work   git rev-list --parents HEAD   egrep    a-f0-9  40      If you have useful tags in place  then git name-rev might give you a quick overview of the history   git rev-list --parents HEAD   egrep    a-f0-9  40      git name-rev --stdin   Bonus  Use this often  Hard to remember  Add a git alias for quick access  git config --global alias first  rev-list --max-parents 0 HEAD    Now you can simply do  git first

User · Answer

You can just reverse your log and just head it for the first result   git log --pretty oneline --reverse   head -1

User · Answer

git log   git log --pretty format  H tail -1

User · Answer

Not the most beautiful way of doing it I guess   git log --pretty oneline   wc -l   This gives you a number then  git log HEAD  lt The number minus one gt

User · Answer

I found that   git log --reverse   shows commits from start

[git] How to show first commit by 'git log'?

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