How can I view all historical changes to a file in SVN

Question

I know that I can svn diff -r a:b repo to view the changes between the two specified revisions. What I'd like is a diff for every revision that changed the file. Is such a command available?

Answer 1

There's no built-in command for it, so I usually just do something like this:

#!/bin/bash  # history_of_file # # Outputs the full history of a given file as a sequence of # logentry/diff pairs.  The first revision of the file is emitted as # full text since there's not previous version to compare it to.  function history_of_file() {     url=$1 # current url of file     svn log -q $url | grep -E -e "^r[[:digit:]]+" -o | cut -c2- | sort -n | {  #       first revision as full text         echo         read r         svn log -r$r $url@HEAD         svn cat -r$r $url@HEAD         echo  #       remaining revisions as differences to previous revision         while read r         do             echo             svn log -r$r $url@HEAD             svn diff -c$r $url@HEAD             echo         done     } } 

Then, you can call it with:

history_of_file $1 

Answer 2

Slightly different from what you described, but I think this might be what you actually need:

svn blame filename 

It will print the file with each line prefixed by the time and author of the commit that last changed it.