Retrieve the commit log for a specific line in a file?

Question

Is there any way to get git to give you a commit log for just commits that touched a particular line in a file?

Like git blame, but git blame will show you the LAST commit that touched a particular line.

I'd really like to get a similar log of, not the list of commits to anywhere in the file, but just the commits that touched a particular line.

Answer 1

See also Git: discover which commits ever touched a range of lines.

---

Since Git 1.8.4, git log has -L to view the evolution of a range of lines.

For example, suppose you look at git blame's output. Here -L 150,+11 means "only look at the lines 150 to 150+11":

$ git blame -L 150,+11 -- git-web--browse.sh a180055a git-web--browse.sh (Giuseppe Bilotta 2010-12-03 17:47:36 +0100 150)            die "The browser $browser is not a180055a git-web--browse.sh (Giuseppe Bilotta 2010-12-03 17:47:36 +0100 151)    fi 5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 152) fi 5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 153)  5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 154) case "$browser" in 81f42f11 git-web--browse.sh (Giuseppe Bilotta 2010-12-03 17:47:38 +0100 155) firefox|iceweasel|seamonkey|iceape) 5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 156)    # Check version because firefox < 2.0 do 5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 157)    vers=$(expr "$($browser_path -version)"  5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 158)    NEWTAB='-new-tab' 5d6491c7 git-browse-help.sh (Christian Couder 2007-12-02 06:07:55 +0100 159)    test "$vers" -lt 2 && NEWTAB='' a0685a4f git-web--browse.sh (Dmitry Potapov   2008-02-09 23:22:22 -0800 160)    "$browser_path" $NEWTAB "$@" & 

And you want to know the history of what is now line 155.

Then, use git log. Here, -L 155,155:git-web--browse.sh means "trace the evolution of lines 155 to 155 in the file named git-web--browse.sh".

$ git log --pretty=short -u -L 155,155:git-web--browse.sh commit 81f42f11496b9117273939c98d270af273c8a463 Author: Giuseppe Bilotta <[email protected]>      web--browse: support opera, seamonkey and elinks  diff --git a/git-web--browse.sh b/git-web--browse.sh --- a/git-web--browse.sh +++ b/git-web--browse.sh @@ -143,1 +143,1 @@ -firefox|iceweasel) +firefox|iceweasel|seamonkey|iceape)  commit a180055a47c6793eaaba6289f623cff32644215b Author: Giuseppe Bilotta <[email protected]>      web--browse: coding style  diff --git a/git-web--browse.sh b/git-web--browse.sh --- a/git-web--browse.sh +++ b/git-web--browse.sh @@ -142,1 +142,1 @@ -    firefox|iceweasel) +firefox|iceweasel)  commit 5884f1fe96b33d9666a78e660042b1e3e5f9f4d9 Author: Christian Couder <[email protected]>      Rename 'git-help--browse.sh' to 'git-web--browse.sh'.  diff --git a/git-web--browse.sh b/git-web--browse.sh --- /dev/null +++ b/git-web--browse.sh @@ -0,0 +127,1 @@ +    firefox|iceweasel) 

Answer 2

You can get a set of commits by using pick-axe.

git log -S'the line from your file' -- path/to/your/file.txt 

This will give you all of the commits that affected that text in that file. If the file was renamed at some point, you can add --follow-parent.

If you would like to inspect the commits at each of these edits, you can pipe that result to git show:

git log ... | xargs -n 1 git show