NAME

git-log - Show commit logs

SYNOPSIS

git log [<options>] [<revision range>] [[--] <path>…​]

DESCRIPTION

Shows the commit logs.

The command takes options applicable to the git rev-listcommand to control what is shown and how, and options applicable tothe git diff-* commands to control how the changeseach commit introduces are shown.

OPTIONS

• —follow

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

• —no-decorate

• —decorate[=short|full|auto|no]

• Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown. If short isspecified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ andrefs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, thefull ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto isspecified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref namesare shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names areshown. The default option is short.

• —decorate-refs=

• —decorate-refs-exclude=

• If no —decorate-refs is given, pretend as if all refs wereincluded. For each candidate, do not use it for decoration if itmatches any patterns given to —decorate-refs-exclude or if itdoesn’t match any of the patterns given to —decorate-refs.

• —source

• Print out the ref name given on the command line by which eachcommit was reached.

• —[no-]use-mailmap

• Use mailmap file to map author and committer names and emailaddresses to canonical real names and email addresses. Seegit-shortlog[1].

• —full-diff

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

Note that this affects all diff-based output types, e.g. thoseproduced by —stat, etc.

• —log-size

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

• -L ,:

• -L ::
• Trace the evolution of the line range given by ","(or the function name regex ) within the . You maynot give any pathspec limiters. This is currently limited toa walk starting from a single revision, i.e., you may onlygive zero or one positive revision arguments.You can specify this option more than once.

and can take one of these forms:

• number

If or is a number, it specifies anabsolute line number (lines count from 1).

• /regex/

This form will use the first line matching the givenPOSIX regex. If is a regex, it will search from the end ofthe previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file.If is “^/regex/”, it will search from the start of file.If is a regex, it will searchstarting at the line given by .

• +offset or -offset

This is only valid for and will specify a numberof lines before or after the line given by .

If “:” is given in place of and , it is aregular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname linethat matches , up to the next funcname line. “:”searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwisefrom the start of file. “^:” searches from the start offile.

• Show only commits in the specified revision range. When no is specified, it defaults to HEAD (i.e. thewhole history leading to the current commit). origin..HEADspecifies all the commits reachable from the current commit(i.e. HEAD), but not from origin. For a complete list ofways to spell , see the _Specifying Ranges_section of gitrevisions[7].

• [—] …​

• Show only commits that are enough to explain how the filesthat match the specified paths came to be. See HistorySimplification below for details and other simplificationmodes.

Paths may need to be prefixed with — to separate them fromoptions or the revision range, when confusion arises.

Commit Limiting

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using thespecial notations explained in the description, additional commitlimiting may be applied.

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g.—since=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using itwith —grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log messagehas a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commitordering and formatting options, such as —reverse.

• -
• -n
• —max-count=

• Limit the number of commits to output.

• —skip=

• Skip number commits before starting to show the commit output.

• —since=

• —after=

• Show commits more recent than a specific date.

• —until=

• —before=

• Show commits older than a specific date.

• —author=

• —committer=

• Limit the commits output to ones with author/committerheader lines that match the specified pattern (regularexpression). With more than one —author=<pattern>,commits whose author matches any of the given patterns arechosen (similarly for multiple —committer=<pattern>).

• —grep-reflog=

• Limit the commits output to ones with reflog entries thatmatch the specified pattern (regular expression). Withmore than one —grep-reflog, commits whose reflog messagematches any of the given patterns are chosen. It is anerror to use this option unless —walk-reflogs is in use.

• —grep=

• Limit the commits output to ones with log message thatmatches the specified pattern (regular expression). Withmore than one —grep=<pattern>, commits whose messagematches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see—all-match).

When —show-notes is in effect, the message from the notes ismatched as if it were part of the log message.

• —all-match

• Limit the commits output to ones that match all given —grep,instead of ones that match at least one.

• —invert-grep

• Limit the commits output to ones with log message that do notmatch the pattern specified with —grep=<pattern>.

• -i

• —regexp-ignore-case

• Match the regular expression limiting patterns without regard to lettercase.

• —basic-regexp

• Consider the limiting patterns to be basic regular expressions;this is the default.

• -E

• —extended-regexp

• Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressionsinstead of the default basic regular expressions.

• -F

• —fixed-strings

• Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don’t interpretpattern as a regular expression).

• -P

• —perl-regexp
• Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regularexpressions.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optionalcompile-time dependency. If Git wasn’t compiled with support for themproviding this option will cause it to die.

• —remove-empty

• Stop when a given path disappears from the tree.

• —merges

• Print only merge commits. This is exactly the same as —min-parents=2.

• —no-merges

• Do not print commits with more than one parent. This isexactly the same as —max-parents=1.

• —min-parents=

• —max-parents=
• —no-min-parents
• —no-max-parents
• Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many parentcommits. In particular, —max-parents=1 is the same as —no-merges,—min-parents=2 is the same as —merges. —max-parents=0gives all root commits and —min-parents=3 all octopus merges.

—no-min-parents and —no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit)again. Equivalent forms are —min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or moreparents) and —max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

• —first-parent

• Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a mergecommit. This option can give a better overview whenviewing the evolution of a particular topic branch,because merges into a topic branch tend to be only aboutadjusting to updated upstream from time to time, andthis option allows you to ignore the individual commitsbrought in to your history by such a merge. Cannot becombined with —bisect.

• —not

• Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof)for all following revision specifiers, up to the next —not.

• —all

• Pretend as if all the refs in refs/, along with HEAD, arelisted on the command line as .

• —branches[=]

• Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listedon the command line as . If is given, limitbranches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?,*, or [, /* at the end is implied.

• —tags[=]

• Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listedon the command line as . If is given, limittags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *,or [, /* at the end is implied.

• —remotes[=]

• Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listedon the command line as . If is given, limitremote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob.If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.

• —glob=

• Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob _are listed on the command line as . Leading _refs/,is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *,or [, /* at the end is implied.

• —exclude=

• Do not include refs matching that the next —all,—branches, —tags, —remotes, or —glob would otherwiseconsider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patternsup to the next —all, —branches, —tags, —remotes, or—glob option (other options or arguments do not clearaccumulated patterns).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, orrefs/remotes when applied to —branches, —tags, or —remotes,respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to —globor —all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be givenexplicitly.

• —reflog

• Pretend as if all objects mentioned by reflogs are listed on thecommand line as <commit>.

• —alternate-refs

• Pretend as if all objects mentioned as ref tips of alternaterepositories were listed on the command line. An alternaterepository is any repository whose object directory is specifiedin objects/info/alternates. The set of included objects maybe modified by core.alternateRefsCommand, etc. Seegit-config[1].

• —single-worktree

• By default, all working trees will be examined by thefollowing options when there are more than one (seegit-worktree[1]): —all, —reflog and—indexed-objects.This option forces them to examine the current working treeonly.

• —ignore-missing

• Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as ifthe bad input was not given.

• —bisect

• Pretend as if the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/badwas listed and as if it was followed by —not and the goodbisection refs refs/bisect/good-* on the commandline. Cannot be combined with —first-parent.

• —stdin

• In addition to the listed on the commandline, read them from the standard input. If a — separator isseen, stop reading commits and start reading paths to limit theresult.

• —cherry-mark

• Like —cherry-pick (see below) but mark equivalent commitswith = rather than omitting them, and inequivalent ones with +.

• —cherry-pick

• Omit any commit that introduces the same change asanother commit on the “other side” when the set ofcommits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual wayto list all commits on only one side of them is with—left-right (see the example below in the description ofthe —left-right option). However, it shows the commits that werecherry-picked from the other branch (for example, “3rd on b” may becherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits areexcluded from the output.

• —left-only
• —right-only
• List only commits on the respective side of a symmetric difference,i.e. only those which would be marked < resp. > by—left-right.

For example, —cherry-pick —right-only A…B omits thosecommits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit inA. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B.More precisely, —cherry-pick —right-only —no-merges gives the exactlist.

• —cherry

• A synonym for —right-only —cherry-mark —no-merges; useful tolimit the output to the commits on our side and mark those thathave been applied to the other side of a forked history withgit log —cherry upstream…mybranch, similar togit cherry upstream mybranch.

• -g

• —walk-reflogs
• Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walkreflog entries from the most recent one to older ones.When this option is used you cannot specify commits toexclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2,and commit1…commit2 notations cannot be used).

With —pretty format other than oneline (for obvious reasons),this causes the output to have two extra lines of informationtaken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shownas ref@{Nth} (where Nth is the reverse-chronological index in thereflog) or as ref@{timestamp} (with the timestamp for that entry),depending on a few rules:

• If the starting point is specified as ref@{Nth}, show the indexformat.

• If the starting point was specified as ref@{now}, show thetimestamp format.

• If neither was used, but —date was given on the command line, showthe timestamp in the format requested by —date.

• Otherwise, show the index format.

Under —pretty=oneline, the commit message isprefixed with this information on the same line.This option cannot be combined with —reverse.See also git-reflog[1].

• —merge

• After a failed merge, show refs that touch files having aconflict and don’t exist on all heads to merge.

• —boundary

• Output excluded boundary commits. Boundary commits areprefixed with -.

History Simplification

Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example thecommits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts ofHistory Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the otheris how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.

The following options select the commits to be shown:

• Commits modifying the given are selected.

• —simplify-by-decoration

• Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

• Default mode

• Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining thefinal state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some sidebranches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging brancheswith the same content)

• —full-history

• Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history.

• —dense

• Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have ameaningful history.

• —sparse

• All commits in the simplified history are shown.

• —simplify-merges

• Additional option to —full-history to remove some needlessmerges from the resulting history, as there are no selectedcommits contributing to this merge.

• —ancestry-path

• When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2_or _commit2 ^commit1), only display commits that existdirectly on the ancestry chain between the commit1 andcommit2, i.e. commits that are both descendants of commit1,and ancestors of commit2.

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commitsthat modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a difffiltered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

In the following, we will always refer to the same example history toillustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assumethat you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:

      .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
     /     /   /   /   /   /
    I     B   C   D   E   Y
     \   /   /   /   /   /
      `-------------'   X

The horizontal line of history A—-Q is taken to be the first parent ofeach merge. The commits are:

• I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents“asdf”, and a file quux exists with contents “quux”. Initialcommits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

• In A, foo contains just “foo”.

• B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial andhence TREESAME to all parents.

• C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to “foobar”,so it is not TREESAME to any parent.

• D sets foo to “baz”. Its merge O combines the strings fromN and D to “foobarbaz”; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.

• E changes quux to “xyzzy”, and its merge P combines thestrings to “quux xyzzy”. P is TREESAME to O, but not to E.

• X is an independent root commit that added a new file side, and Ymodified it. Y is TREESAME to X. Its merge Q added side to P, andQ is TREESAME to P, but not to Y.

rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excludingcommits based on whether —full-history and/or parent rewriting(via —parents or —children) are used. The following settingsare available.

• Default mode
• Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent(though this can be changed, see —sparse below). If thecommit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, followonly that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAMEparents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow allparents.

This results in:

      .-A---N---O
     /     /   /
    I---------D

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one isavailable, removed B from consideration entirely. C wasconsidered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to anempty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with —parents, but that doesnot affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown theparent lines.

• —full-history without parent rewriting
• This mode differs from the default in one point: always followall parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them.Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that areincluded, this does not imply that the merge itself is! Inthe example, we get

    I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. E,C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the othersdo not appear.

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talkabout the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we showthem disconnected.

• —full-history with parent rewriting
• Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME(though this can be changed, see —sparse below).

Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten:Along each parent, prune away commits that are not includedthemselves. This results in

      .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
     /     /   /   /   /
    I     B   /   D   /
     \   /   /   /   /
      `-------------'

Compare to —full-history without rewriting above. Note that Ewas pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P wasrewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C andN, and X, Y and Q.

In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAMEaffects inclusion:

• —dense

• Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAMEto any parent.

• —sparse

• All commits that are walked are included.

Note that without —full-history, this still simplifies merges: ifone of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the othersides of the merge are never walked.

• —simplify-merges
• First, build a history graph in the same way that—full-history with parent rewriting does (see above).

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the finalhistory according to the following rules:

• Set C' to C.

• Replace each parent P of C' with its simplification P'. Inthe process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents or that areroot commits TREESAME to an empty tree, and remove duplicates, but take careto never drop all parents that we are TREESAME to.

• If after this parent rewriting, C' is a root or merge commit (haszero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains.Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent.

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to—full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

      .-A---M---N---O
     /     /       /
    I     B       D
     \   /       /
      `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over —full-history:

• N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of theother parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME.

• P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was thenremoved completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.

• Q's parent list had Y simplified to X. X was then removed, because itwas a TREESAME root. Q was then removed completely, because it had oneparent and is TREESAME.

Finally, there is a fifth simplification mode available:

• —ancestry-path
• Limit the displayed commits to those directly on the ancestrychain between the “from” and “to” commits in the given commitrange. I.e. only display commits that are ancestor of the “to”commit and descendants of the “from” commit.

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

        D---E-------F
       /     \       \
      B---C---G---H---I---J
     /                     \
    A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M,but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to seewhat happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sensethat “what does M have that did not exist in D”. The result in thisexample would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself,of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with thebug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to viewonly the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e.excluding C and K. This is exactly what the —ancestry-pathoption does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

        E-------F
         \       \
          G---H---I---J
                   \
                L--M

The —simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only thebig picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commitsthat are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME(in other words, kept after history simplification rules describedabove) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change thecontents of the paths given on the command line. All othercommits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).

Commit Ordering

By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.

• —date-order

• Show no parents before all of its children are shown, butotherwise show commits in the commit timestamp order.

• —author-date-order

• Show no parents before all of its children are shown, butotherwise show commits in the author timestamp order.

• —topo-order

• Show no parents before all of its children are shown, andavoid showing commits on multiple lines of historyintermixed.

For example, in a commit history like this:

    ---1----2----4----7
    \           \
     3----5----6----8---

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, gitrev-list and friends with —date-order show the commits in thetimestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

With —topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 53 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order toavoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixedtogether.

• —reverse
• Output the commits chosen to be shown (see Commit Limitingsection above) in reverse order. Cannot be combined with—walk-reflogs.

Object Traversal

These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories.

• —no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)]

• Only show the given commits, but do not traverse their ancestors.This has no effect if a range is specified. If the argumentunsorted is given, the commits are shown in the order they weregiven on the command line. Otherwise (if sorted or no argumentwas given), the commits are shown in reverse chronological orderby commit time.Cannot be combined with —graph.

• —do-walk

• Overrides a previous —no-walk.

Commit Formatting

• —pretty[=]
• —format=
• Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format,where can be one of oneline, short, medium,full, fuller, email, raw, format:_and _tformat:. When is none of the above,and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if—pretty=tformat: were given.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for eachformat. When = part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repositoryconfiguration (see git-config[1]).

• —abbrev-commit
• Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit objectname, show only a partial prefix. Non default number ofdigits can be specified with "—abbrev=" (which also modifiesdiff output, if it is displayed).

This should make "—pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable forpeople using 80-column terminals.

• —no-abbrev-commit

• Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates—abbrev-commit and those options which imply it such as"—oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.

• —oneline

• This is a shorthand for "—pretty=oneline —abbrev-commit"used together.

• —encoding=

• The commit objects record the encoding used for the log messagein their encoding header; this option can be used to tell thecommand to re-code the commit log message in the encodingpreferred by the user. For non plumbing commands thisdefaults to UTF-8. Note that if an object claims to be encodedin X and we are outputting in X, we will output the objectverbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the originalcommit may be copied to the output.

• —expand-tabs=

• —expand-tabs
• —no-expand-tabs
• Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spacesto fill to the next display column that is multiple of )in the log message before showing it in the output.—expand-tabs is a short-hand for —expand-tabs=8, and—no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for —expand-tabs=0,which disables tab expansion.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the logmessage by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full,and fuller).

• —notes[=]
• Show the notes (see git-notes[1]) that annotate thecommit, when showing the commit log message. This is the defaultfor git log, git show and git whatchanged commands whenthere is no —pretty, —format, or —oneline option givenon the command line.

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in thecore.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or correspondingenvironment overrides). See git-config[1] for more details.

With an optional argument, use the treeish to find the notesto display. The treeish can specify the full refname when it beginswith refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwiserefs/notes/ is prefixed to form a full name of the ref.

Multiple —notes options can be combined to control which notes arebeing displayed. Examples: "—notes=foo" will show only notes from"refs/notes/foo"; "—notes=foo —notes" will show both notes from"refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).

• —no-notes

• Do not show notes. This negates the above —notes option, byresetting the list of notes refs from which notes are shown.Options are parsed in the order given on the command line, so e.g."—notes —notes=foo —no-notes —notes=bar" will only show notesfrom "refs/notes/bar".

• —show-notes[=]

• —[no-]standard-notes

• These options are deprecated. Use the above —notes/—no-notesoptions instead.

• —show-signature

• Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the signatureto gpg —verify and show the output.

• —relative-date

• Synonym for —date=relative.

• —date=

• Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format, suchas when using —pretty. log.date config variable sets a defaultvalue for the log command’s —date option. By default, datesare shown in the original time zone (either committer’s orauthor’s). If -local is appended to the format (e.g.,iso-local), the user’s local time zone is used instead.

—date=relative shows dates relative to the current time,e.g. “2 hours ago”. The -local option has no effect for—date=relative.

—date=local is an alias for —date=default-local.

—date=iso (or —date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO 8601-like format.The differences to the strict ISO 8601 format are:

• a space instead of the T date/time delimiter

• a space between time and time zone

• no colon between hours and minutes of the time zone

—date=iso-strict (or —date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps in strictISO 8601 format.

—date=rfc (or —date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822format, often found in email messages.

—date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

—date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch (1970-01-0100:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offsetfrom UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, andthe second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formattedwith strftime("%s %z")).Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epochvalue (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanyingtimezone value.

—date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not match thecurrent time-zone, and doesn’t print the whole date if that matches(ie skip printing year for dates that are "this year", but also skipthe whole date itself if it’s in the last few days and we can just saywhat weekday it was). For older dates the hour and minute is alsoomitted.

—date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since1970). As with —raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -localhas no effect.

—date=format:… feeds the format … to your system strftime,except for %z and %Z, which are handled internally.Use —date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale’spreferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list offormat placeholders. When using -local, the correct syntax is—date=format-local:….

—date=default is the default format, and is similar to—date=rfc2822, with a few exceptions:

• there is no comma after the day-of-week

• the time zone is omitted when the local time zone is used

• —parents

• Print also the parents of the commit (in the form "commit parent…​").Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

• —children

• Print also the children of the commit (in the form "commit child…​").Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

• —left-right

• Mark which side of a symmetric difference a commit is reachable from.Commits from the left side are prefixed with < and those fromthe right with >. If combined with —boundary, thosecommits are prefixed with -.

For example, if you have this topology:

         y---b---b  branch B
        / \ /
       /   .
      /   / \
     o---x---a---a  branch A

you would get an output like this:

    $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B
 
    >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
    >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
    <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
    <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
    -yyyyyyy... 1st on b
    -xxxxxxx... 1st on a

• —graph
• Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit historyon the left hand side of the output. This may cause extra linesto be printed in between commits, in order for the graph historyto be drawn properly.Cannot be combined with —no-walk.

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

This implies the —topo-order option by default, but the—date-order option may also be specified.

• —show-linear-break[=]
• When —graph is not used, all history branches are flattenedwhich can make it hard to see that the two consecutive commitsdo not belong to a linear branch. This option puts a barrierin between them in that case. If <barrier> is specified, itis the string that will be shown instead of the default one.

Diff Formatting

Listed below are options that control the formatting of diff output.Some of them are specific to git-rev-list[1], however other diffoptions may be given. See git-diff-files[1] for more options.

• -c

• With this option, diff output for a merge commitshows the differences from each of the parents to the merge resultsimultaneously instead of showing pairwise diff between a parentand the result one at a time. Furthermore, it lists only fileswhich were modified from all parents.

• —cc

• This flag implies the -c option and further compresses thepatch output by omitting uninteresting hunks whose contents inthe parents have only two variants and the merge result picksone of them without modification.

• —combined-all-paths

• This flag causes combined diffs (used for merge commits) tolist the name of the file from all parents. It thus only haseffect when -c or —cc are specified, and is likely onlyuseful if filename changes are detected (i.e. when eitherrename or copy detection have been requested).

• -m

• This flag makes the merge commits show the full diff likeregular commits; for each merge parent, a separate log entryand diff is generated. An exception is that only diff againstthe first parent is shown when —first-parent option is given;in that case, the output represents the changes the mergebrought into the then-current branch.

• -r

• Show recursive diffs.

• -t

• Show the tree objects in the diff output. This implies -r.

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-formatis not oneline, email or raw, an additional line isinserted before the Author: line. This line begins with"Merge: " and the sha1s of ancestral commits are printed,separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may notnecessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if youhave limited your view of history: for example, if you areonly interested in changes related to a certain directory orfile.

There are several built-in formats, and you can defineadditional formats by setting a pretty.<name>config option to either another format name, or aformat: string, as described below (seegit-config[1]). Here are the details of thebuilt-in formats:

• oneline

<sha1> <title line>

This is designed to be as compact as possible.

• short

commit <sha1>
Author: <author>

<title line>

• medium

commit <sha1>
Author: <author>
Date:   <author date>

<title line>

<full commit message>

• full

commit <sha1>
Author: <author>
Commit: <committer>

<title line>

<full commit message>

• fuller

commit <sha1>
Author:     <author>
AuthorDate: <author date>
Commit:     <committer>
CommitDate: <committer date>

<title line>

<full commit message>

• email

From <sha1> <date>
From: <author>
Date: <author date>
Subject: [PATCH] <title line>

<full commit message>

• raw

The raw format shows the entire commit exactly asstored in the commit object. Notably, the SHA-1s aredisplayed in full, regardless of whether —abbrev or—no-abbrev are used, and parents information show thetrue parent commits, without taking grafts or historysimplification into account. Note that this format affects the waycommits are displayed, but not the way the diff is shown e.g. withgit log —raw. To get full object names in a raw diff format,use —no-abbrev.

• format:

The format: format allows you to specify which informationyou want to show. It works a little bit like printf format,with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n_instead of \n_.

E.g, _format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n"_would show something like this:

The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

The placeholders are:

• Placeholders that expand to a single literal character:

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emnem)_%n_
- 

newline

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emem)_%%_
- 

a raw %

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emx00em)_%x00_
- 

print a byte from a hex code

• Placeholders that affect formatting of later placeholders:

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emCredem)_%Cred_
- 

switch color to red

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emCgreenem)_%Cgreen_
- 

switch color to green

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emCblueem)_%Cblue_
- 

switch color to blue

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emCresetem)_%Creset_
- 

reset color

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emC82308203em)_%C(…​)_
- 

color specification, as described under Values in the"CONFIGURATION FILE" section of git-config[1]. Bydefault, colors are shown only when enabled for log output(by color.diff, color.ui, or —color, and respectingthe auto settings of the former if we are going to aterminal). %C(auto,…) is accepted as a historicalsynonym for the default (e.g., %C(auto,red)). Specifying%C(always,…) will show the colors even when color isnot otherwise enabled (though consider just using—color=always to enable color for the whole output,including this format and anything else git might color).auto alone (i.e. %C(auto)) will turn on auto coloringon the next placeholders until the color is switchedagain.

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emmem)_%m_
- 

left (<), right (>) or boundary (-) mark

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emwltwgtlti1gtlti2gtem)_%w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])_
- 

switch line wrapping, like the -w option ofgit-shortlog[1].

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emltltNgttruncltruncmtruncem)_%&lt;(<n>[,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])_
- 

make the next placeholder take atleast N columns, padding spaces onthe right if necessary. Optionallytruncate at the beginning (ltrunc),the middle (mtrunc) or the end(trunc) if the output is longer thanN columns. Note that truncatingonly works correctly with N >= 2.

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emltltNgtem)_%&lt;|(<n>)_
- 

make the next placeholder take at least until Nthcolumns, padding spaces on the right if necessary

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgtltNgtememgtltNgtem)_%&gt;(<n>)_, _%&gt;|(<n>)_
- 

similar to %<(), %<|() respectively,but padding spaces on the left

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgtgtltNgtememgtgtltNgtem)_%&gt;&gt;(<n>)_, _%&gt;&gt;|(<n>)_
- 

similar to %>(), _%>|()_respectively, except that if the nextplaceholder takes more spaces than given andthere are spaces on its left, use thosespaces

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgtltltNgtememgtltltNgtem)_%&gt;&lt;(<n>)_, _%&gt;&lt;|(<n>)_
- 

similar to %<(), _%<|()_respectively, but padding both sides(i.e. the text is centered)

• Placeholders that expand to information extracted from the commit:

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emHem)_%H_
- 

commit hash

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emhem)_%h_
- 

abbreviated commit hash

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emTem)_%T_
- 

tree hash

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emtem)_%t_
- 

abbreviated tree hash

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emPem)_%P_
- 

parent hashes

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-empem)_%p_
- 

abbreviated parent hashes

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emanem)_%an_
- 

author name

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emaNem)_%aN_
- 

author name (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog[1]or git-blame[1])

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emaeem)_%ae_
- 

author email

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emaEem)_%aE_
- 

author email (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog[1]or git-blame[1])

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emadem)_%ad_
- 

author date (format respects —date= option)

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emaDem)_%aD_
- 

author date, RFC2822 style

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emarem)_%ar_
- 

author date, relative

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-ematem)_%at_
- 

author date, UNIX timestamp

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emaiem)_%ai_
- 

author date, ISO 8601-like format

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emaIem)_%aI_
- 

author date, strict ISO 8601 format

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcnem)_%cn_
- 

committer name

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcNem)_%cN_
- 

committer name (respecting .mailmap, seegit-shortlog[1] or git-blame[1])

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emceem)_%ce_
- 

committer email

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcEem)_%cE_
- 

committer email (respecting .mailmap, seegit-shortlog[1] or git-blame[1])

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcdem)_%cd_
- 

committer date (format respects —date= option)

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcDem)_%cD_
- 

committer date, RFC2822 style

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcrem)_%cr_
- 

committer date, relative

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emctem)_%ct_
- 

committer date, UNIX timestamp

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emciem)_%ci_
- 

committer date, ISO 8601-like format

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emcIem)_%cI_
- 

committer date, strict ISO 8601 format

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emdem)_%d_
- 

ref names, like the —decorate option of git-log[1]

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emDem)_%D_
- 

ref names without the " (", ")" wrapping.

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emSem)_%S_
- 

ref name given on the command line by which the commit was reached(like git log —source), only works with git log

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emeem)_%e_
- 

encoding

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emsem)_%s_
- 

subject

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emfem)_%f_
- 

sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-embem)_%b_
- 

body

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emBem)_%B_
- 

raw body (unwrapped subject and body)

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emNem)_%N_
- 

commit notes

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emGGem)_%GG_
- 

raw verification message from GPG for a signed commit

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emGem)_%G?_
- 

show "G" for a good (valid) signature,"B" for a bad signature,"U" for a good signature with unknown validity,"X" for a good signature that has expired,"Y" for a good signature made by an expired key,"R" for a good signature made by a revoked key,"E" if the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key)and "N" for no signature

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emGSem)_%GS_
- 

show the name of the signer for a signed commit

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emGKem)_%GK_
- 

show the key used to sign a signed commit

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emGFem)_%GF_
- 

show the fingerprint of the key used to sign a signed commit

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emGPem)_%GP_
- 

show the fingerprint of the primary key whose subkey was usedto sign a signed commit

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgDem)_%gD_
- 

reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1} or refs/stash@{2minutes ago}; the format follows the rules described for the-g option. The portion before the @ is the refname asgiven on the command line (so git log -g refs/heads/masterwould yield refs/heads/master@{0}).

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgdem)_%gd_
- 

shortened reflog selector; same as %gD, but the refnameportion is shortened for human readability (sorefs/heads/master becomes just master).

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgnem)_%gn_
- 

reflog identity name

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgNem)_%gN_
- 

reflog identity name (respecting .mailmap, seegit-shortlog[1] or git-blame[1])

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgeem)_%ge_
- 

reflog identity email

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgEem)_%gE_
- 

reflog identity email (respecting .mailmap, seegit-shortlog[1] or git-blame[1])

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emgsem)_%gs_
- 

reflog subject

- [](https://git-scm.com/docs/#Documentation/git-log.txt-emtrailersoptionsem)_%(trailers[:options])_
- 

display the trailers of the body asinterpreted bygit-interpret-trailers[1]. Thetrailers string may be followed by a colonand zero or more comma-separated options:

  - 

key=: only show trailers with specified key. Matching is donecase-insensitively and trailing colon is optional. If option isgiven multiple times trailer lines matching any of the keys areshown. This option automatically enables the only option so thatnon-trailer lines in the trailer block are hidden. If that is notdesired it can be disabled with only=false. E.g.,%(trailers:key=Reviewed-by) shows trailer lines with keyReviewed-by.

  - 

only[=val]: select whether non-trailer lines from the trailerblock should be included. The only keyword may optionally befollowed by an equal sign and one of true, on, yes to omit orfalse, off, no to show the non-trailer lines. If option isgiven without value it is enabled. If given multiple times the lastvalue is used.

  - 

separator=: specify a separator inserted between trailerlines. When this option is not given each trailer line isterminated with a line feed character. The string SEP may containthe literal formatting codes described above. To use comma asseparator one must use %x2C as it would otherwise be parsed asnext option. If separator option is given multiple times only thelast one is used. E.g., %(trailers:key=Ticket,separator=%x2C )shows all trailer lines whose key is "Ticket" separated by a commaand a space.

  - 

unfold[=val]: make it behave as if interpret-trailer’s —unfoldoption was given. In same way as to for only it can be followedby an equal sign and explicit value. E.g.,%(trailers:only,unfold=true) unfolds and shows all trailer lines.

  - 

valueonly[=val]: skip over the key part of the trailer line and onlyshow the value part. Also this optionally allows explicit value.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feedis inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if theplaceholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all consecutiveline-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are deleted if and only if theplaceholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a (space) after % of a placeholder, a spaceis inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if theplaceholder expands to a non-empty string.

• tformat:

The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that itprovides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. Inother words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually anewline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries.This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properlyterminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does.For example:

$ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \
  | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
4da45be
7134973 -- NO NEWLINE
 
$ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
  | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
4da45be
7134973

In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is interpretedas if it has tformat: in front of it. For example, these two areequivalent:

$ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef
$ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef

COMMON DIFF OPTIONS

• -p
• -u
• —patch

• Generate patch (see section on generating patches).

• -s

• —no-patch

• Suppress diff output. Useful for commands like git show thatshow the patch by default, or to cancel the effect of —patch.

• -U

• —unified=

• Generate diffs with lines of context instead ofthe usual three. Implies —patch.Implies -p.

• —output=

• Output to a specific file instead of stdout.

• —output-indicator-new=

• —output-indicator-old=
• —output-indicator-context=

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

• —raw

• For each commit, show a summary of changes using the raw diffformat. See the "RAW OUTPUT FORMAT" section ofgit-diff[1]. This is different from showing the logitself in raw format, which you can achieve with—format=raw.

• —patch-with-raw

• Synonym for -p —raw.

• —indent-heuristic

• Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patcheseasier to read. This is the default.

• —no-indent-heuristic

• Disable the indent heuristic.

• —minimal

• Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possiblediff is produced.

• —patience

• Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.

• —histogram

• Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.

• —anchored=

• Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once,and starts with this text, this algorithm attempts to prevent it fromappearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patiencediff" algorithm internally.

• —diff-algorithm={patience|minimal|histogram|myers}
• Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

• default, myers

• The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.

• minimal

• Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff isproduced.

• patience

• Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.

• histogram

• This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "supportlow-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to anon-default value and want to use the default one, then youhave to use —diff-algorithm=default option.

• —stat[=[,[,]]]
• Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessarywill be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graphpart. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columnsif not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by<width>. The width of the filename part can be limited bygiving another width <name-width> after a comma. The widthof the graph part can be limited by using—stat-graph-width=<width> (affects all commands generatinga stat graph) or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<width>(does not affect git format-patch).By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit theoutput to the first <count> lines, followed by … ifthere are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with —stat-width=<width>,—stat-name-width=<name-width> and —stat-count=<count>.

• —compact-summary

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

• —numstat

• Similar to —stat, but shows number of added anddeleted lines in decimal notation and pathname withoutabbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. Forbinary files, outputs two - instead of saying0 0.

• —shortstat

• Output only the last line of the —stat format containing totalnumber of modified files, as well as number of added and deletedlines.

• -X[]

• —dirstat[=]
• Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for eachsub-directory. The behavior of —dirstat can be customized bypassing it a comma separated list of parameters.The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configurationvariable (see git-config[1]).The following parameters are available:

• changes

• Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have beenremoved from the source, or added to the destination. This ignoresthe amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words,rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes.This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.

• lines

• Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diffanalysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binaryfiles, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have nonatural concept of lines). This is a more expensive —dirstatbehavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearrangedlines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting outputis consistent with what you get from the other —*stat options.

• files

• Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed.Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This isthe computationally cheapest —dirstat behavior, since it doesnot have to look at the file contents at all.

• cumulative

• Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well.Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentagesreported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior canbe specified with the noncumulative parameter.

• An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default).Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changesare not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoringdirectories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files,and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories:—dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

• —cumulative

• Synonym for —dirstat=cumulative

• —dirstat-by-file[=…​]

• Synonym for —dirstat=files,param1,param2…​

• —summary

• Output a condensed summary of extended header informationsuch as creations, renames and mode changes.

• —patch-with-stat

• Synonym for -p —stat.

• -z

• Separate the commits with NULs instead of with new newlines.

Also, when —raw or —numstat has been given, do not mungepathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted asexplained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (seegit-config[1]).

• —name-only

• Show only names of changed files.

• —name-status

• Show only names and status of changed files. See the descriptionof the —diff-filter option on what the status letters mean.

• —submodule[=]

• Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying—submodule=short the short format is used. This format justshows 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 likegit-submodule[1] summary does. When —submodule=diffis specified, the _diff format is used. This format shows aninline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between thecommit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short formatif the config option is unset.

• —color[=]

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

• —no-color

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

• —color-moved[=]

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

• no

• Moved lines are not highlighted.

• default

• Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible modein the future.

• plain

• Any line that is added in one location and was removedin another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved.Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed linesthat are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up anymoved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determineif a block of code was moved without permutation.

• blocks

• Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric charactersare detected greedily. The detected blocks arepainted using either the color.diff.{old,new}Moved color.Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.

• zebra

• Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocksare painted using either the color.diff.{old,new}Moved color orcolor.diff.{old,new}MovedAlternative. The change betweenthe two colors indicates that a new block was detected.

• dimmed-zebra

• Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting partsof moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacentblocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting.dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.

• —no-color-moved

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

• —color-moved-ws=

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

• no

• Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.

• ignore-space-at-eol

• Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.

• ignore-space-change

• Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespaceat line end, and considers all other sequences of one ormore whitespace characters to be equivalent.

• ignore-all-space

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

• allow-indentation-change

• Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, thengroup the moved code blocks only into a block if the change inwhitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with theother modes.

• —no-color-moved-ws

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

• —word-diff[=]

• Show a word diff, using the to delimit changed words.By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see—word-diff-regex below. The defaults to plain, andmust be one of:

• color

• Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies —color.

• plain

• Show words as [-removed-] and {+added+}. Makes noattempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input,so the output may be ambiguous.

• porcelain

• Use a special line-based format intended for scriptconsumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in theusual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/ character at the beginning of the line and extending to theend of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by atilde ~ on a line of its own.

• none

• Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used tohighlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

• —word-diff-regex=
• Use to decide what a word is, instead of consideringruns of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies—word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the is considered a word. Anything between these matches isconsidered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of findingdifferences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regularexpression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters.A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at thenewline.

For example, —word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a wordand, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, seegitattributes[5] or git-config[1]. Giving it explicitlyoverrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff driversoverride configuration settings.

• —color-words[=]

• Equivalent to —word-diff=color plus (if a regex wasspecified) —word-diff-regex=<regex>.

• —no-renames

• Turn off rename detection, even when the configurationfile gives the default to do so.

• —[no-]rename-empty

• Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.

• —check

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

• —ws-error-highlight=

• Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or newlines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma,none resets previous values, default reset the list tonew and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. Whenthis option is not given, and the configuration variablediff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors innew lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are coloredwith color.diff.whitespace.

• —full-index

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

• —binary

• In addition to —full-index, output a binary diff thatcan be applied with git-apply. Implies —patch.

• —abbrev[=]

• Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal objectname in diff-raw format output and diff-tree headerlines, show only a partial prefix. This isindependent of the —full-index option above, which controlsthe diff-patch output format. Non default number ofdigits can be specified with —abbrev=<n>.

• -B[][/]

• —break-rewrites[=[][/]]
• Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete andcreate. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a filenot as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a veryfew lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as asingle deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion ofeverything new, and the number m controls this aspect of the -Boption (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of theoriginal should remain in the result for Git to consider it a totalrewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series ofdeletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as thesource of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappearedas the source of a rename), and the number n controls this aspect ofthe -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change withaddition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file’s size areeligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename toanother file.

• -M[]
• —find-renames[=]

• 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 similarityindex (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to thefile’s size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider adelete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the filehasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read asa fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 isthe same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use-M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.

• -C[]

• —find-copies[=]

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

• —find-copies-harder

• For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies onlyif the original file of the copy was modified in the samechangeset. This flag makes the commandinspect unmodified files as candidates for the source ofcopy. This is a very expensive operation for largeprojects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one-C option has the same effect.

• -D

• —irreversible-delete
• Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but notthe diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patchis not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this issolely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing thetext after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacksenough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually,hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion partof a delete/create pair.

• -l

• The -M and -C options require O(n^2) processing time where nis the number of potential rename/copy targets. Thisoption prevents rename/copy detection from running ifthe number of rename/copy targets exceeds the specifiednumber.

• —diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)…​[*]]

• Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C),Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have theirtype (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …​) changed (T),are Unmerged (U), areUnknown (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, allpaths are selected if there is any file that matchesother criteria in the comparison; if there is no filethat matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g.—diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, diffsfrom the index to the working tree can never have Added entries(because the set of paths included in the diff is limited by what is inthe index). Similarly, copied and renamed entries cannot appear ifdetection for those types is disabled.

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

It is useful when you’re looking for an exact block of code (like astruct), and want to know the history of that block since it firstcame into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interestingblock in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get thevery first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

• -G
• Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removedlines that match .

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> —pickaxe-regex and-G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the samefile:

+    return !regexec(regexp, two->ptr, 1, &regmatch, 0);
...
-    hit = !regexec(regexp, mf2.ptr, 1, &regmatch, 0);

While git log -G"regexec(regexp" will show this commit, git log-S"regexec(regexp" —pickaxe-regex will not (because the number ofoccurrences of that string did not change).

Unless —text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconvfilter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in gitdiffcore[7] for moreinformation.

• —find-object=
• Look for differences that change the number of occurrences ofthe specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is differentin that it doesn’t search for a specific string but for a specificobject id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option ingit-log to also find trees.

• —pickaxe-all

• When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in thatchangeset, not just the files that contain the changein .

• —pickaxe-regex

• Treat the given to -S as an extended POSIX regularexpression to match.

• -O

• 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.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in.All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are outputfirst, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but notthe first) are output next, and so on.All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are outputlast, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of thefile.If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same patternbut no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other isthe normal order.

is parsed as follows:

• Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators forreadability.

• Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be usedfor comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of thepattern if it starts with a hash.

• Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used forfnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname alsomatches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathnamecomponents matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar"matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

• -R

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

• —relative[=]

• When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can betold to exclude changes outside the directory and showpathnames relative to it with this option. When you arenot in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), youcan name which subdirectory to make the output relativeto by giving a as an argument.

• -a

• —text

• Treat all files as text.

• —ignore-cr-at-eol

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

• —ignore-space-at-eol

• Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.

• -b

• —ignore-space-change

• Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespaceat line end, and considers all other sequences of one ormore whitespace characters to be equivalent.

• -w

• —ignore-all-space

• Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignoresdifferences even if one line has whitespace where the otherline has none.

• —ignore-blank-lines

• Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.

• —inter-hunk-context=

• Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified numberof lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other.Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config optionis unset.

• -W

• —function-context

• Show whole surrounding functions of changes.

• —ext-diff

• Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set anexternal diff driver with gitattributes[5], you needto use this option with git-log[1] and friends.

• —no-ext-diff

• Disallow external diff drivers.

• —textconv

• —no-textconv

• Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be runwhen comparing binary files. See gitattributes[5] fordetails. Because textconv filters are typically a one-wayconversion, the resulting diff is suitable for humanconsumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconvfilters are enabled by default only for git-diff[1] andgit-log[1], but not for git-format-patch[1] ordiff plumbing commands.

• —ignore-submodules[=]

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

• —src-prefix=

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

• —dst-prefix=

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

• —no-prefix

• Do not show any source or destination prefix.

• —line-prefix=

• Prepend an additional prefix to every line of output.

• —ita-invisible-in-index

• By default entries added by "git add -N" appear as an existingempty 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 bereverted with —ita-visible-in-index. Both options areexperimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see alsogitdiffcore[7].

Generating patches with -p

When "git-diff-index", "git-diff-tree", or "git-diff-files" are runwith a -p option, "git diff" without the —raw option, or"git log" with the "-p" option, theydo not produce the output described above; instead they produce apatch file. You can customize the creation of such patches via theGIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables.

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditionaldiff format:

• It is preceded with a "git diff" header that looks like this:

diff --git a/file1 b/file2

The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy isinvolved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion,/dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

When rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show thename of the source file of the rename/copy and the name ofthe file that rename/copy produces, respectively.

• It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

old mode <mode>
new mode <mode>
deleted file mode <mode>
new file mode <mode>
copy from <path>
copy to <path>
rename from <path>
rename to <path>
similarity index <number>
dissimilarity index <number>
index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

File modes are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file typeand file permission bits.

Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, andthe dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. Itis a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. Thesimilarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equalfiles, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the oldfile made it into the new one.

The index line includes the SHA-1 checksum before and after the change.The is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise,separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

• Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained forthe configuration variable core.quotePath (seegit-config[1]).

• All the file1 files in the output refer to files before thecommit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit.It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. Forexample, this patch will swap a and b:

diff --git a/a b/b
rename from a
rename to b
diff --git a/b b/a
rename from b
rename to a

combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or —cc option toproduce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the defaultformat when showing merges with git-diff[1] orgit-show[1]. Note also that you can give the -m option to anyof these commands to force generation of diffs with individual parentsof a merge.

A combined diff format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
    return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }
 
- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +    unsigned char sha1[20];
 +    struct commit *cmit;
    struct commit_list *list;
    static int initialized = 0;
    struct commit_name *n;
 
 +    if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +        usage(describe_usage);
 +    cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +    if (!cmit)
 +        usage(describe_usage);
 +
    if (!initialized) {
        initialized = 1;
        for_each_ref(get_name);

• It is preceded with a "git diff" header, that looks likethis (when -c option is used):

diff --combined file

or like this (when —cc option is used):

diff --cc file

• It is followed by one or more extended header lines(this example shows a merge with two parents):

index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
new file mode <mode>
deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one ofthe is different from the rest. Extended headers withinformation about detected contents movement (renames andcopying detection) are designed to work with diff of two and are not used by combined diff format.

• It is followed by two-line from-file/to-file header

--- a/file
+++ b/file

Similar to two-line header for traditional unified diffformat, /dev/null is used to signal created or deletedfiles.

However, if the —combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of atwo-line from-file/to-file you get a N+1 line from-file/to-file header,where N is the number of parents in the merge commit

--- a/file
--- a/file
--- a/file
+++ b/file

This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection isactive, to allow you to see the original name of the file in differentparents.

• Chunk header format is modified to prevent people fromaccidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff formatwas created for review of merge commit changes, and was notmeant for apply. The change is similar to the change in theextended index header:

@@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunkheader for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows twofiles A and B with a single column that has - (minus — appears in A but removed in B), + (plus — missing in A butadded to B), or " " (space — unchanged) prefix, this formatcompares two or more files file1, file2,…​ with one file X, andshows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each offileN is prepended to the output line to note how X’s line isdifferent from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears infileN but it does not appear in the result. A + characterin the column N means that the line appears in the result,and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line wasadded, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changedfrom both files (hence two - removals from both file1 andfile2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appearin either file1 or file2). Also eight other lines are the samefrom file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of amerge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are theparents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares thetwo unresolved merge parents with the working tree file(i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka"their version").

EXAMPLES

• git log —no-merges

• Show the whole commit history, but skip any merges

• git log v2.6.12.. include/scsi drivers/scsi

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

• git log —since="2 weeks ago" — gitk

• Show the changes during the last two weeks to the file gitk.The — is necessary to avoid confusion with the branch namedgitk

• git log —name-status release..test

• Show the commits that are in the "test" branch but not yetin the "release" branch, along with the list of pathseach commit modifies.

• git log —follow builtin/rev-list.c

• Shows the commits that changed builtin/rev-list.c, includingthose commits that occurred before the file was given itspresent name.

• git log —branches —not —remotes=origin

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

• git log master —not —remotes=*/master

• Shows all commits that are in local master but not in any remoterepository master branches.

• git log -p -m —first-parent

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

• git log -L '/int main/',/^}/:main.c

• Shows how the function main() in the file main.c evolvedover time.

• git log -3

• Limits the number of commits to show to 3.

DISCUSSION

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

• The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequencesof bytes. There is no encoding translation at the corelevel.

• Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. Thisapplies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well aspath names in command line arguments, environment variablesand config files (.git/config (see git-config[1]),gitignore[5], gitattributes[5] andgitmodules[5]).

Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply assequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encodingconversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, usingnon-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and filesystems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However,repositories created on such systems will not work properly onUTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa.Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names tobe UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

• Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but otherextended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includesISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32,EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5,EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encodedin UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not toforce UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particularproject find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Gitdoes not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep inmind.

• git commit and git commit-tree issuesa warning if the commit log message given to it does not looklike a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say yourproject uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is tohave i18n.commitencoding in .git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
    commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

Commit objects created with the above setting record the valueof i18n.commitEncoding in its encoding header. This is tohelp other people who look at them later. Lack of this headerimplies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

• git log, git show, git blame and friends look at theencoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code thelog message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You canspecify the desired output encoding withi18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
    logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

If you do not have this configuration variable, the value ofi18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit logmessage when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commitobject level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily areversible operation.

CONFIGURATION

See git-config[1] for core variables and git-diff[1]for settings related to diff generation.

• format.pretty

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

• i18n.logOutputEncoding

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

• log.date

• Default format for human-readable dates. (Compare the—date option.) Defaults to "default", which means to writedates like Sat May 8 19:35:34 2010 -0500.

If the format is set to "auto:foo" and the pager is in use, format"foo" will be the used for the date format. Otherwise "default" willbe used.

• log.follow

• If true, git log will act as if the —follow option was used whena single is given. This has the same limitations as —follow,i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files and does not work wellon non-linear history.

• log.showRoot

• If false, git log and related commands will not treat theinitial commit as a big creation event. Any root commits ingit log -p output would be shown without a diff attached.The default is true.

• log.showSignature

• If true, git log and related commands will act as if the—show-signature option was passed to them.

• mailmap.*

• See git-shortlog[1].

• notes.displayRef

• Which refs, in addition to the default set by core.notesRefor GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commitmessages with the log family of commands. Seegit-notes[1].

May be an unabbreviated ref name or a glob and may be specifiedmultiple times. A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist,but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

This setting can be disabled by the —no-notes option,overridden by the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable,and overridden by the —notes=<ref> option.

GIT

Part of the git[1] suite