git-log(1) Manual Page

Continue listing the history of a file beyond renames (works only for a single file).

Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. The option --decorate is short-hand for --decorate=short. Default to configuration value of log.decorate if configured, otherwise, auto.

For each candidate reference, do not use it for decoration if it matches any patterns given to --decorate-refs-exclude or if it doesn’t match any of the patterns given to --decorate-refs. The log.excludeDecoration config option allows excluding refs from the decorations, but an explicit --decorate-refs pattern will override a match in log.excludeDecoration.

When specified, this option clears all previous --decorate-refs or --decorate-refs-exclude options and relaxes the default decoration filter to include all references. This option is assumed if the config value log.initialDecorationSet is set to all.

Print out the ref name given on the command line by which each commit was reached.

Use mailmap file to map author and committer names and email addresses to canonical real names and email addresses. See git-shortlog(1).

Without this flag, git log -p <path>... shows commits that touch the specified paths, and diffs about the same specified paths. With this, the full diff is shown for commits that touch the specified paths; this means that "<path>…" limits only commits, and doesn’t limit diff for those commits.

Include a line “log size <number>” in the output for each commit, where <number> is the length of that commit’s message in bytes. Intended to speed up tools that read log messages from git log output by allowing them to allocate space in advance.

Trace the evolution of the line range given by <start>,<end>, or by the function name regex <funcname>, within the <file>. You may not give any pathspec limiters. This is currently limited to a walk starting from a single revision, i.e., you may only give zero or one positive revision arguments, and <start> and <end> (or <funcname>) must exist in the starting revision. You can specify this option more than once. Implies --patch. Patch output can be suppressed using --no-patch, but other diff formats (namely --raw, --numstat, --shortstat, --dirstat, --summary, --name-only, --name-status, --check) are not currently implemented.

Show only commits in the specified revision range. When no <revision-range> is specified, it defaults to HEAD (i.e. the whole history leading to the current commit). origin..HEAD specifies all the commits reachable from the current commit (i.e. HEAD), but not from origin. For a complete list of ways to spell <revision-range>, see the Specifying Ranges section of gitrevisions(7).

Show only commits that are enough to explain how the files that match the specified paths came to be. See History Simplification below for details and other simplification modes.

Generate patch (see [generate_patch_text_with_p]).

Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.

Show diffs for merge commits in the default format. This is similar to --diff-merges=on, except -m will produce no output unless -p is given as well.

Produce combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=combined -p.

Produce dense combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=dense-combined -p.

Produce diff with respect to first parent for both merge and regular commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=first-parent -p.

Produce remerge-diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=remerge -p.

Synonym for --diff-merges=off.

Specify diff format to be used for merge commits. Default is off unless --first-parent is in use, in which case first-parent is the default.

This flag causes combined diffs (used for merge commits) to list the name of the file from all parents. It thus only has effect when --diff-merges=[dense-]combined is in use, and is likely only useful if filename changes are detected (i.e. when either rename or copy detection have been requested).

Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.

Output to a specific file instead of stdout.

Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.

For each commit, show a summary of changes using the raw diff format. See the "RAW OUTPUT FORMAT" section of git-diff(1). This is different from showing the log itself in raw format, which you can achieve with --format=raw.

Synonym for -p --raw.

Show the tree objects in the diff output.

Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.

Disable the indent heuristic.

Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.

Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.

Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally "+l" if it’s a symlink) and mode changes ("+x" or "-x" for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.

Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.

Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see git-config(1)). The following parameters are available:

Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative

Synonym for --dirstat=files,param1,param2…

Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.

Synonym for -p --stat.

Separate the commits with NULs instead of newlines.

Show only names of changed files. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the git-log(1) manual page.

Show only names and status of changed files. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.

Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like git-submodule(1) summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.

Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.

Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.

Show a word diff, using the <mode> to delimit changed words. By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.

Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.

Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.

Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.

Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.

Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.

In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

If generating diffs, detect and report renames for each commit. For following files across renames while traversing history, see --follow. If n is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file’s size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.

Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If n is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.

For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified string (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter’s use.

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn’t search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.

Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see git-config(1)). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.

Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.

When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.

Treat all files as text.

Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.

Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.

Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.

Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.

Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.

Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.

Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.

Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in gitattributes(5)).

Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with gitattributes(5), you need to use this option with git-log(1) and friends.

Disallow external diff drivers.

Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See gitattributes(5) for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for git-diff(1) and git-log(1), but not for git-format-patch(1) or diff plumbing commands.

Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. <when> can be either "none", "untracked", "dirty" or "all", which is the default. Using "none" will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in git-config(1) or gitmodules(5). When "untracked" is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using "dirty" ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using "all" hides all changes to submodules.

Show the given source prefix instead of "a/".

Show the given destination prefix instead of "b/".

Do not show any source or destination prefix.

Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This is usually the default already, but may be used to override config such as diff.noprefix.

Prepend an additional prefix to every line of output.

By default entries added by "git add -N" appear as an existing empty file in "git diff" and a new file in "git diff --cached". This option makes the entry appear as a new file in "git diff" and non-existent in "git diff --cached". This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

Show the whole commit history, but skip any merges

Show all commits since version v2.6.12 that changed any file in the include/scsi or drivers/scsi subdirectories

Show the changes during the last two weeks to the file gitk. The -- is necessary to avoid confusion with the branch named gitk

Show the commits that are in the "test" branch but not yet in the "release" branch, along with the list of paths each commit modifies.

Shows the commits that changed builtin/rev-list.c, including those commits that occurred before the file was given its present name.

Shows all commits that are in any of local branches but not in any of remote-tracking branches for origin (what you have that origin doesn’t).

Shows all commits that are in local master but not in any remote repository master branches.

Shows the history including change diffs, but only from the “main branch” perspective, skipping commits that come from merged branches, and showing full diffs of changes introduced by the merges. This makes sense only when following a strict policy of merging all topic branches when staying on a single integration branch.

Shows how the function main() in the file main.c evolved over time.

Limits the number of commits to show to 3.

Default for the --format option. (See Pretty Formats above.) Defaults to medium.

Encoding to use when displaying logs. (See Discussion above.) Defaults to the value of i18n.commitEncoding if set, and UTF-8 otherwise.

If true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and git-whatchanged(1) assume --abbrev-commit. You may override this option with --no-abbrev-commit.

Set the default date-time mode for the log command. Setting a value for log.date is similar to using git log's --date option. See git-log(1) for details.

Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown by the log command. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. This is the same as the --decorate option of the git log.

By default, git log only shows decorations for certain known ref namespaces. If all is specified, then show all refs as decorations.

Exclude the specified patterns from the log decorations. This is similar to the --decorate-refs-exclude command-line option, but the config option can be overridden by the --decorate-refs option.

Set diff format to be used when --diff-merges=on is specified, see --diff-merges in git-log(1) for details. Defaults to separate.

If true, git log will act as if the --follow option was used when a single <path> is given. This has the same limitations as --follow, i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files and does not work well on non-linear history.

A list of colors, separated by commas, that can be used to draw history lines in git log --graph.

If true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event. This is equivalent to a diff against an empty tree. Tools like git-log(1) or git-whatchanged(1), which normally hide the root commit will now show it. True by default.

If true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and git-whatchanged(1) assume --show-signature.

If true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and git-whatchanged(1) assume --use-mailmap, otherwise assume --no-use-mailmap. True by default.

Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union, or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section of git-notes(1) for more information on each strategy.

Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general "notes.mergeStrategy". See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section in git-notes(1) for more information on the available strategies.

Which ref (or refs, if a glob or specified more than once), in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages with the git log family of commands.

When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase), if this variable is false, git will not copy notes from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true. See also "notes.rewriteRef" below.

When copying notes during a rewrite (see the "notes.rewrite.<command>" option), determines what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to concatenate.

When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. May be a glob, in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You may also specify this configuration several times.