Git - how do I view the change history of a file

Question

How can I view the change history of an individual file, complete with what has changed ?

I have got as far as : git log -- filename
which shows me the commit history of the file, but how do I get at the content of each of the changes ?

Thanks - I'm trying to make the transition from MS SourceSafe and that used to be a simple right click / show history.

Answer 1

git show

Answer 2

If you're using the git GUI (on Windows) under the Repository menu you can use "Visualize master's History. Highlight a commit in the top pane and a file in the lower right and you'll see the diff for that commit in the lower left.

Answer 3

You can use

git log -p filename

to let git generate the patches for each log entry, see

git help log

for more options - it can actually do a lot of nice things :) To get just the diff for a specifiy commit you can

git show HEAD

or any other revision by identifier. Or use gitk to browse the changes visually.

Answer 4

git whatchanged -p [filename] is also equivalent to git log -p [filename] in this case.

You can also see when a specific line of code inside a file was changed with git blame [filename]. This will print out a short commit id, the author, timestamp, and complete line o code for every line in the file. This is very useful after you've found a bug and you want to know when it was introduced (or who's fault it was).

Answer 5

I'd use:

 gitk filename.

Answer 6

To show what revision and author last modified each line of a file:

git blame filename

Answer 7

Or:

gitx -- <path/to/filename>

if you're using gitx