Git log without an author's commits

Question

There's a project we're working on where the majority of commits are added in by a front-end developer. He's editing mainly HTML, CSS, JavaScript files that are not related to the back-end work that I'm helping with. It would be great if I could show the git log minus commits added by the front-end developer, so I could get a view of commits just related to the backend.

Is there an option I can pass to git log that would allow me to exclude all commits by an author? I just want to exclude this one developer's commits, I still care about viewing commits from other developers as well.

Answer 1

You need a Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word? Negative lookahead will do just that, but you have to ask git to use --perl-regexp.

git log --author='^(?!krlmlr).*$' --perl-regexp

According to git help log,

--perl-regexp ... requires libpcre to be compiled in.

Apparently, not all gits out there have this; for the one shipped with Ubuntu 13.04, this works out of the box.

Answer 2

git rev-list --format='%aN' --all \
| sed 'N;/\nauthorname$/d;s/commit \(.*\)/\n.*/\1/' \
| git log --stdin

and of course substitute whatever heads you want for --all above.

Edit: list/select/process pipelines like this are bread and butter, it's just how git (like a lot of unix tools) was built.