Git log output messed up

Question

Hi, When I do git log in certain places the output is messed up and it doesn't bring me back to the command line. In some of my repos it works fine however. Any ideas? Output is pasted below:

[server]$ git log
commit c84acb29115822d94fe0112bacfb835911ffaa11
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Sun Feb 14 03:13:05 2010 -0800

   Correct spelling mistake

commit 4f613bdddc2b4965b75914c08017a916fa3d07be
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Feb 13 08:39:52 2010 -0800

   slightly better gradient

commit 96d2a2bb74c287af18a491f616ce784cc30ff1ea
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Feb 13 08:31:15 2010 -0800

   Add gradient background under menu

commit 80fab463530791e6e9ebb06e475b67211b88a8d4
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Feb 12 14:33:04 2010 -0800

   change copy back

commit f0952894251854432a6b960d39460a926c819202
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Feb 12 13:49:23 2010 -0800

   change copy

commit a0ff98ffc7a2359149842e96cafefbf29f8fe93d
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Feb 12 13:31:57 2010 -0800

   Add ignore file and deploy script

commit c5f21ee90b13e5e8ad542875a9525c4775f298e4
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Feb 12 09:09:04 2010 -0800

   make noie6 page very basic

commit 07e2765446ac4071804b9b13f4396635252a8090
Author: My Name <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Feb 12 08:25:17 2010 -0800
:

Answer 1

Ok, I've realised you can ctrl+z out of this to get back to the command line.

Answer 2

That's because your terminal is paging the results through less—the same program used in the man pages. You can navigate the full log with your up/down arrow keys.

Pressing q will exit and bring you back to the terminal.

Answer 3

If you don't want to use a pager, set the GIT_PAGER environment variable to cat.

On Windows:

C:\> set GIT_PAGER=cat
C:\> git log

On Unix:

$ GIT_PAGER=cat git log

You can also use git's --no-pager option:

$ git --no-pager log

Answer 4

There is a colon in the last line, which means the output is being paged, so you can use SPACE and other keys available in paging programs.