How to find the new path of a renamed file whose original name is known?

Question

Consider following usecase:

I'm working on my local branch while refactoring has been done on the main branch. Now some files (classes) have been renamed and/or moved to new locations. When merging i get lots and lots of import-errors due to missing classes.

--A--B--C--D--E-- (master)
   \           \
    F--G--H--I--J  (topic)

In A there are the old names wich i used in F--G--H--I.

In B--C--D--E the files are refactored resulting in new file names in E. This includes chained renames like

   B: path/to/File.java              
-> C: path/to/BetterName.java
-> D: better/package/BetterName.java 
-> E: final/package/FinalName.java

Now merging results in J with many (compilation) errors due to the missing refactorings on my branch. (Because i still refer to path.to.File instead of final.package.FinalName

In order to fix the broken build, i need to know the new names for the old classes.

Is there a git command to get all the renames that have been applied to a particular file?

Answer 1

Git should find the renames of the files. However, if the file has had 50% or more lines change in that file, it will no longer be considered a rename. You can change this threshold if you wish.

Here is the command to do it:

git log -M --diff-filter=R --stat

It will only show you the renames. If you want to change the threshold to something else other than the default 50%, you can just add the number to the M option:

git log -M90 --diff-filter=R --stat

will only consider a file as renamed if the contents have changed by no more than 10%

UPDATE:

To skip all the intermediate steps, use diff instead. Git will follow the renames for you:

git diff -M --diff-filter=R --name-status ..master | cut -f2-

when you are on your topic branch.

You can then pipe this to make a bunch of sed instructions to adjust your references.