Git blame -- prior commits

Question

Is it possible to see who edited a specific line before the commit reported by git blame  like a history of commits for a given line   For example  I run the following  on the superb uncrustify project      git blame -L10  1 src options cpp  fe25b6d  Ben Gardner 2009-10-17 13 13 55 -0500 10   include  prototypes h    How can I find out who edited that line before commit fe25b6d  And who edited it before that commit

User · Answer

Amber s answer is correct but I found it unclear  The syntax is   git blame  commit id  --  path to file    Note  the -- is used to separate the tree-ish sha1 from the relative file paths  1  For example   git blame master -- index html   Full credit to Amber for knowing all the things

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Building on Will Shepard s answer  his output will include duplicate lines for commits where there was no change  so you can filter those as as follows  using this answer   LINE 1 FILE a  for commit in   git rev-list HEAD  FILE   do git blame -n -L LINE  1  commit --  FILE  done   sed    N           n 1   P  D    Note that I removed the REVS argument and this goes back to the root commit  This is due to Max Nanasy s observation above

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Building on the previous answer  this bash one-liner should give you what you re looking for  It displays the git blame history for a particular line of a particular file  through the last 5 revisions   LINE 10 FILE src options cpp REVS 5  for commit in   git rev-list -n  REVS HEAD  FILE   do git blame -n -L LINE  1  commit --  FILE  done   In the output of this command  you might see the content of the line change  or the line number displayed might even change  for a particular commit   This often indicates that the line was added for the first time  after that particular commit  It could also indicate the line was moved from another part of the file

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If you are using JetBrains Idea IDE  and derivatives  you can select several lines  right click for the context menu  then Git -  Show history for selection  You will see list of commits which were affecting the selected lines

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You can use git log -L to view the evolution of a range of lines   For example    git log -L 15 23 filename txt   means  trace the evolution of lines 15 to 23 in the file named filename txt

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Building on DavidN s answer and I want to follow renamed file   LINE 8 FILE Info plist  for commit in   git log --format   h    --name-only --follow --  FILE   xargs echo   perl -pe  s    s   g    do hash   echo  commit   cut -f1 -d       fileMayRenamed   echo  commit   cut -f2 -d       git blame -n -L LINE  1  hash --  fileMayRenamed  done   sed    N           n 1   P  D    ref  nicely display file rename history in git log

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Build on stangls s answer  I put this script in my PATH  even on Windows  as git-bh   That allows me to look for all commits where a word was involved   git bh path to myfile myWord   Script      bin bash f  1 shift csha      git log --pretty format  H --   f   echo          while read hash  do     res   git blame -L   1    1  hash --   f  2 gt  dev null   sed  s             sha   res           if       res          amp  amp     csha         sha       then       echo  ---   hash         echo    res         csha    sha       fi   done

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You might want to check out   git gui blame  lt filename gt    Gives you a nice graphical display of changes like  git blame  but with clickable links per line  to move into earlier commits  Hover over the links to get a popup with commit details  Not my credits    found it here   http   zsoltfabok com blog 2012 02 git-blame-line-history   git gui is a graphical Tcl Tc interface to git  Without any other params it starts a pretty simple but useful graphical app for committing files  hunks or even single lines and other similar commands like amend  revert  push    It s part of the git stock suite  On windows it is included in the installer  On debian - I don t know about other  nix systems - it has to be installed separately   apt-get install git-gui   From the docs   https   git-scm com docs git-gui     DESCRIPTION      A Tcl Tk based graphical user interface to Git  git gui focuses on   allowing users to make changes to their repository by making new   commits  amending existing ones  creating branches  performing local   merges  and fetching pushing to remote repositories       Unlike gitk  git gui focuses on commit generation and single file   annotation and does not show project history  It does however supply   menu actions to start a gitk session from within git gui       git gui is known to work on all popular UNIX systems  Mac OS X  and   Windows  under both Cygwin and MSYS   To the extent possible OS   specific user interface guidelines are followed  making git gui a   fairly native interface for users       COMMANDS      blame      Start a blame viewer on the specified file on the given version  or working directory if not specified        browser      Start a tree browser showing all files in the specified commit  Files selected through the browser are opened in the blame viewer       citool      Start git gui and arrange to make exactly one commit before exiting and returning to the shell  The interface is limited to only   commit actions  slightly reducing the application   s startup time and   simplifying the menubar       version      Display the currently running version of git gui

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I use this little bash script to look at a blame history   First parameter  file to look at  Subsequent parameters  Passed to git blame     bin bash f  1 shift   git log --pretty format  H --   f   echo          while read hash  do     echo  ---  hash      git blame     hash --   f    sed  s          done     You may supply blame-parameters like -L 70  10 but it is better to use the regex-search of git blame because line-numbers typically  change  over time

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git blame -L 10  1 fe25b6d  -- src options cpp  You can specify a revision for git blame to look back starting from  instead of the default of HEAD   fe25b6d  is the parent of fe25b6d   Edit  New to Git 2 23  we have the --ignore-rev option added to git blame  git blame --ignore-rev fe25b6d  While this doesn t answer OP s question of giving the stack of commits  you ll use git log for that  as per the other answer   it is a better way of this solution  as you won t potentially misblame the other lines

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As of Git 2 23 you can use git blame --ignore-rev  For the example given in the question this would be   git blame -L10  1 src options cpp --ignore-rev fe25b6d    however it s a trick question because fe25b6d is the file s first revision

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A very unique solution for this problem is using git log      git log -p -M --follow --stat -- path to your file   As explained by Andre here

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I wrote ublame python tool that returns a naive history of a file commits that impacted a given search term  you ll find more information on the   roject page

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There s also recursive-blame   It can be installed with  npm install -g recursive-blame

[git] Git blame -- prior commits?

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