Git Command Reference – TortoiseGit – Documentation – TortoiseGit – Windows Shell Interface to Git

git-log - Show commit logs

git log [] [] [[--] …]

Shows the commit logs.

List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s) given with a ^ in front of them. The output is given in reverse chronological order by default.

You can think of this as a set operation. Commits reachable from any of the commits given on the command line form a set, and then commits reachable from any of the ones given with ^ in front are subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the command's output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used to further limit the result.

Thus, the following command:

means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar, but not from baz".

A special notation ".." can be used as a short-hand for "^ ". For example, either of the following may be used interchangeably:

Another special notation is "…" which is useful for merges. The resulting set of commits is the symmetric difference between the two operands. The following two commands are equivalent:

The command takes options applicable to the the section called “git-rev-list(1)” command to control what is shown and how, and options applicable to the the section called “git-diff(1)” command to control how the changes each commit introduces are shown.

Without this flag, git log -p ... 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 "…" limits only commits, and doesn't limit diff for those commits.

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

Trace the evolution of the line range given by ,, or by the function name regex , within the . 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 and (or ) 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.

and can take one of these forms:

number

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

/regex/

This form will use the first line matching the given POSIX regex. If is a regex, it will search from the end of the 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 search starting at the line given by .

+offset or -offset

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

If : is given in place of and , it is a regular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname line that matches , up to the next funcname line. : searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. ^: searches from the start of file. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

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.

Paths may need to be prefixed with -- to separate them from options or the revision range, when confusion arises.

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

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. --since= limits to commits newer than , and using it with --grep= further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches ), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as --reverse.

Limit the commits output to ones with log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep=, commits whose message matches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see --all-match).

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

Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn't compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many parent commits. In particular, --max-parents=1 is the same as --no-merges, --min-parents=2 is the same as --merges. --max-parents=0 gives 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 more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

When finding commits to include, follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge.

This option also changes default diff format for merge commits to first-parent, see --diff-merges=first-parent for details.

Do not include refs matching that the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do not clear accumulated patterns).

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

Omit any commit that introduces the same change as another commit on the other side when the set of commits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, 3rd on b may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.

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

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

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

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

Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also the section called “git-reflog(1)”.

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

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

The following options select the commits to be shown:

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

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the . We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

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

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

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

Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent (though this can be changed, see --sparse below). If the commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all parents.

This results in:

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.

This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow all 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 are included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In the example, we get

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

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.

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 included themselves. This results in

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

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

All commits that are walked are included.

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

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 final history according to the following rules:

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

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

There is another simplification mode available:

Limit the displayed commits to those directly on the ancestry chain between the from and to commits in the given commit range. 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:

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 see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that what does M have that did not exist in D. The result in this example 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 the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create a new example history.

A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in the file's simplified history. Let's demonstrate a new example and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges works in that case:

For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z, and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however, was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents, but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent, so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The resulting history graph is:

When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the resulting graph is:

Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt. This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches along a single trunk: manu unrelated merges appear in the --full-history results.

When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared" from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit history before returning a single result. This can make the option difficult to use for very large repositories.

The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are working on the same repository, it is important which merge commits introduced a change into an important branch. The problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This commit may have information about why the change X came to override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

In addition to the commits shown in the default history, show each merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent but is TREESAME to a later parent.

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

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

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

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, and avoid showing commits on multiple lines of history intermixed.

For example, in a commit history like this:

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git rev-list and friends with --date-order show the commits in the timestamp 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 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together.

These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories.

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, 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 each format. When = part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show a prefix that names the object uniquely. "--abbrev=" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length of the prefix.

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

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to 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 log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

Show the notes (see the section called “git-notes(1)”) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no --pretty, --format, or --oneline option given on the command line.

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). See the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

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

Multiple --notes options can be combined to control which notes are being 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).

Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format, such as when using --pretty. log.date config variable sets a default value for the log command's --date option. By default, dates are shown in the original time zone (either committer's or author'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:

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

--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, 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 (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

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

--date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -local has no effect.

--date=format:... feeds the format ... to your system strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale's preferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list of format 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:

Mark which side of a symmetric difference a commit is reachable from. Commits from the left side are prefixed with . If combined with --boundary, those commits are prefixed with -.

For example, if you have this topology:

you would get an output like this:

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

or like this (when the --cc option is used):

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

The mode ,.. line appears only if at least one of the is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected contents movement (renames and copying 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

Similar to two-line header for traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-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

This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

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

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

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

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

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

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and config files (.git/config (see the section called “git-config(1)”), the section called “gitignore(5)”, the section called “gitattributes(5)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)”).

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

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

git commit and git commit-tree issues a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

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

git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

See the section called “git-config(1)” for core variables and the section called “git-diff(1)” for settings related to diff generation.

Default format for human-readable dates. (Compare the --date option.) Defaults to "default", which means to write dates 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" will be used.

Which refs, in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages with the log family of commands. See the section called “git-notes(1)”.

May be an unabbreviated ref name or a glob and may be specified multiple 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= option.

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite