Git - list all authors of a folder of files?

Question

How can I list the author names of a particular folder that's versioned by git?

I see that I can git blame a file and list the author of each line, but I can't do that for a folder, and I would also like only a unique list (each author listed only once)

Answer 1

Actually, there is a native Git command for that, git shortlog:

git shortlog -n -s -- myfolder 

will give a list of contributors that created commits that touched myfolder. Option -s means summary and just shows the number of commits per contributor. Without it, the command lists the commit message summaries (1st line) per author. Option -n sorts the authors by number of commits (from most to least) instead of alphabetical.

And just in case you have not encountered a loose -- in a git command yet: it is a separator option to mark that what follows cannot be a <revspec> (range of commits), but only a <pathspec> (file and folder names). That means: if you would omit the -- and by accident had a branch or tag named myfolder, the command git shortlog -n -s myfolder would not filter for the directory myfolder, but instead filter for history of branch or tag "myfolder". This separator is therefore useful (and necessary) in a number of git commands, like log or checkout, whenever you want to be clear whether what you specify is either a revision (commmit, branch, tag) or a path (folder or file name). And of course, this site already has a question on this.