NAME
git-rev-list - Lists commit objects in reverse chronological order SYNOPSIS
git rev-list [ max-count=
] [ skip= ] [ max-age=
] [ min-age=
] [ sparse ] [ merges ] [ no-merges ]
[ min-parents=
] [ no-min-parents ]
[ max-parents=
] [ no-max-parents ]
[ first-parent ]
[ remove-empty ]
[ full-history ] [ not ] [ all ] [ branches[=
] ] [ tags[= ] ] [ remotes[= ] ] [ glob=
] [ ignore-missing ] [ stdin ] [ quiet ]
[ topo-order ] [ parents ] [ timestamp ]
[ left-right ]
[ left-only ]
[ right-only ]
[ cherry-mark ]
[ cherry-pick ] [ encoding[=
] ] [ (author|committer|grep)= ] [ regexp-ignore-case | -i ]
[ extended-regexp | -E ]
[ fixed-strings | -F ] [ date=(local|relative|default|iso|rfc|short) ]
[ [objects | objects-edge] [ unpacked ] ] [ pretty | header ] [ bisect ]
[ bisect-vars ]
[ bisect-all ] [ merge ] [ reverse ]
[ walk-reflogs ]
[ no-walk ] [ do-walk ]
... [ ... ] DESCRIPTION List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s) given with a ^ in front of them. The output is given in reverse chronological order by default. You can think of this as a set operation. Commits given on the command line form a set of commits that are reachable from any of them, and then commits reachable from any of the ones given with ^ in front are subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the command’s output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used to further limit the result. Thus, the following command: $ git rev-list foo bar ^baz means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar, but not from baz".
A special notation "
.. " can be used as a short-hand for "^' ' ". For example, either of the following may be used interchangeably: $ git rev-list origin..HEAD
$ git rev-list HEAD ^origin Another special notation is "
... " which is useful for merges. The resulting set of commits is the symmetric difference between the two operands. The following two commands are equivalent: $ git rev-list A B not $(git merge-base all A B)
$ git rev-list A...B
rev-list is a very essential Git command, since it provides the ability to build and traverse commit ancestry graphs. For this reason, it has a lot of different options that enables it to be used by commands as different as git bisect and git repack. OPTIONS Commit Limiting Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied. Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. since=
limits to commits newer than , and using it with grep= further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches ), unless otherwise noted. Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as reverse. -
, -n , max-count= Limit the number of commits to output. skip= Skip number commits before starting to show the commit output. since= , after= Show commits more recent than a specific date. until= , before= Show commits older than a specific date. max-age=
, min-age= Limit the commits output to specified time range. author= , committer= Limit the commits output to ones with author/committer header lines that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one author= , commits whose author matches any of the given patterns are chosen (similarly for multiple committer= ). grep-reflog=
Limit the commits output to ones with reflog entries that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one grep-reflog, commits whose reflog message matches any of the given patterns are chosen. It is an error to use this option unless
walk-reflogs is in use. grep=
Limit the commits output to ones with log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one grep= , commits whose message matches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see all-match).
When show-notes is in effect, the message from the notes as if it is part of the log message.
all-match Limit the commits output to ones that match all given grep, instead of ones that match at least one.
-i, regexp-ignore-case Match the regexp limiting patterns without regard to letters case.
basic-regexp Consider the limiting patterns to be basic regular expressions; this is the default.
-E, extended-regexp Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressions instead of the default basic regular expressions.
-F, fixed-strings Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don’t interpret pattern as a regular expression).
perl-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regexp. Requires libpcre to be compiled in.
remove-empty Stop when a given path disappears from the tree. merges Print only merge commits. This is exactly the same as
min-parents=2.
no-merges Do not print commits with more than one parent. This is exactly the
same as max-parents=1.
min-parents=
, max-parents= , no-min-parents, no-max-parents Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many
commits. In particular, max-parents=1 is the same as no-merges,
min-parents=2 is the same as merges. max-parents=0 gives all
root commits and min-parents=3 all octopus merges.
no-min-parents and no-max-parents reset these limits (to no
limit) again. Equivalent forms are min-parents=0 (any commit has
0 or more parents) and max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).
first-parent Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge. not Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof) for all following revision specifiers, up to the next not. all Pretend as if all the refs in refs/ are listed on the command line as
. branches[= ] Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed on the command line as . If is given, limit branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied. tags[= ] Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed on the command line as . If is given, limit tags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied. remotes[= ] Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the command line as . If is given, limit remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
glob=
Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob
are listed on the command line as . Leading refs/, is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied. ignore-missing Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as if the bad input was not given. stdin In addition to the
listed on the command line, read them from the standard input. If a separator is seen, stop reading commits and start reading paths to limit the result. quiet Don’t print anything to standard output. This form is primarily meant to allow the caller to test the exit status to see if a range of objects is fully connected (or not). It is faster than redirecting stdout to /dev/null as the output does not have to be formatted. cherry-mark
Like cherry-pick (see below) but mark equivalent commits with = rather than omitting them, and inequivalent ones with +.
cherry-pick Omit any commit that introduces the same change as another commit on the "other side" when the set of commits are limited with symmetric difference. For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list
all commits on only one side of them is with left-right (see the
example below in the description of the left-right option). It
however shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other
branch (for example, "3rd on b" may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.
left-only, right-only List only commits on the respective side of a symmetric range, i.e.
only those which would be marked < resp. > by left-right.
For example, cherry-pick right-only A...B omits those commits
from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More
precisely, cherry-pick right-only no-merges gives the exact list. cherry
A synonym for right-only cherry-mark no-merges; useful to limit the output to the commits on our side and mark those that have been applied to the other side of a forked history with git log cherry upstream...mybranch, similar to git cherry upstream mybranch.
-g, walk-reflogs Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk reflog entries from the most recent one to older ones. When this option is used you cannot specify commits to exclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2, nor commit1...commit2 notations cannot be used). With pretty format other than oneline (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. By default, commit@{Nth} notation is used in the output. When the starting commit is specified as commit@{now}, output also uses commit@{timestamp} notation instead. Under pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with
reverse. See also git-reflog(1). merge After a failed merge, show refs that touch files having a conflict and don’t exist on all heads to merge. boundary Output uninteresting commits at the boundary, which are usually not shown. History Simplification Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the commits modifying a particular
. But there are two parts of History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history. The following options select the commits to be shown: Commits modifying the given are selected. simplify-by-decoration Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected. Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history. The following options affect the way the simplification is performed: Default mode Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining the final state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some side branches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging branches with the same content)
full-history Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history. dense Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a meaningful history. sparse All commits in the simplified history are shown.
simplify-merges
Additional option to full-history to remove some needless merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected commits contributing to this merge.
ancestry-path When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), only display commits that exist directly on the ancestry chain between the commit1 and commit2, i.e. commits that are both descendants of commit1, and ancestors of commit2. A more detailed explanation follows. Suppose you specified foo as the
. We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.) In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph: .-A-M-N-O-P / / / / / I B C D E \ / / / /
`-'
The horizontal line of history A-P is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are: · I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents "asdf", and a file quux exists with contents "quux". Initial commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME. · In A, foo contains just "foo". · B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial and hence TREESAME to all parents. · C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to "foobar", so it is not TREESAME to any parent. · D sets foo to "baz". Its merge O combines the strings from N and D to "foobarbaz"; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent. · E changes quux to "xyzzy", and its merge P combines the strings to "quux xyzzy". Despite appearing interesting, P is TREESAME to all parents.
rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excluding
commits based on whether full-history and/or parent rewriting (via parents or children) are used. The following settings are available. Default mode Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent (though this can be changed, see sparse below). If the commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all parents. This results in:
.-A-N-O / / /
I-D Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME. Parent/child relations are only visible with parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.
full-history without parent rewriting This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow all parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them. Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that are included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In the example, we get I A B N D O P and M were excluded because they are TREESAME to a parent. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear. Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.
full-history with parent rewriting Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME (though this can be changed, see sparse below). Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in
.-A-M-N-O-P / / / / / I B / D / \ / / / /
`-'
Compare to full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N. Note also that P was included despite being TREESAME. In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME affects inclusion: dense Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent. sparse All commits that are walked are included.
Note that without full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.
simplify-merges
First, build a history graph in the same way that full-history with parent rewriting does (see above). Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules: · Set C' to C. · Replace each parent P of C' with its simplification P'. In the process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents, and remove duplicates. · If after this parent rewriting, C' is a root or merge commit (has zero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains. Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent. The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to
full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:
.-A-M-N-O / / / I B D \ / /
`-'
Note the major differences in N and P over full-history: · N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of the other parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME. · P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME. Finally, there is a fifth simplification mode available:
ancestry-path Limit the displayed commits to those directly on the ancestry chain between the "from" and "to" commits in the given commit range. I.e. only display commits that are ancestor of the "to" commit, and descendants of the "from" commit. As an example use case, consider the following commit history:
D-E-F / \ \
B-C-G-H-I-J / \
A-K-LM A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that "what does M have that did not exist in D". The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course). When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D,
i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:
E-F \ \
G-H-I-J \ LM
The simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only the big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME (in other words, kept after history simplification rules described above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the contents of the paths given on the command line. All other commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away). Bisection Helpers bisect Limit output to the one commit object which is roughly halfway between included and excluded commits. Note that the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad is added to the included commits (if it exists)
and the good bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* are added to the excluded commits (if they exist). Thus, supposing there are no refs in refs/bisect/, if
$ git rev-list bisect foo ^bar ^baz outputs midpoint, the output of the two commands
$ git rev-list foo ^midpoint
$ git rev-list midpoint ^bar ^baz would be of roughly the same length. Finding the change which introduces a regression is thus reduced to a binary search: repeatedly generate and test new 'midpoint’s until the commit chain is of length one.
bisect-vars This calculates the same as bisect, except that refs in refs/bisect/ are not used, and except that this outputs text ready to be eval’ed by the shell. These lines will assign the name of the midpoint revision to the variable bisectrev, and the expected number of commits to be tested after bisectrev is tested to bisectnr, the expected number of commits to be tested if bisectrev turns out to be good to bisectgood, the expected number of commits to be tested if bisectrev turns out to be bad to bisectbad, and the number of commits we are bisecting right now to bisectall.
bisect-all This outputs all the commit objects between the included and excluded commits, ordered by their distance to the included and excluded commits. Refs in refs/bisect/ are not used. The farthest from them is displayed first. (This is the only one displayed by bisect.) This is useful because it makes it easy to choose a good commit to test when you want to avoid to test some of them for some reason (they may not compile for example).
This option can be used along with bisect-vars, in this case, after all the sorted commit objects, there will be the same text as
if bisect-vars had been used alone. Commit Ordering By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.
date-order Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the commit timestamp order.
topo-order Show no parents before all of its children are shown, and avoid showing commits on multiple lines of history intermixed. For example, in a commit history like this:
-1247 \ \
3568- where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git
rev-list and friends with date-order show the commits in the timestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.
With topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together. reverse Output the commits in reverse order. Cannot be combined with
walk-reflogs. Object Traversal These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories. objects Print the object IDs of any object referenced by the listed commits. objects foo ^bar thus means "send me all object IDs which I need to download if I have the commit object bar, but not foo".
objects-edge Similar to objects, but also print the IDs of excluded commits
prefixed with a "-" character. This is used by git-pack-objects(1) to build "thin" pack, which records objects in deltified form based on objects contained in these excluded commits to reduce network traffic. unpacked Only useful with objects; print the object IDs that are not in packs.
no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)] Only show the given commits, but do not traverse their ancestors. This has no effect if a range is specified. If the argument "unsorted" is given, the commits are show in the order they were given on the command line. Otherwise (if "sorted" or no argument was given), the commits are show in reverse chronological order by commit time.
do-walk
Overrides a previous no-walk. Commit Formatting
Using these options, git-rev-list(1) will act similar to the more
specialized family of commit log tools: git-log(1), git-show(1), and
git-whatchanged(1) pretty[=
], format= Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where
can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, email, raw and format: . See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When omitted, the format defaults to medium. Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see git-config(1)).
abbrev-commit
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show only a partial prefix. Non default number of digits can be specified with "abbrev=
" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed). This should make "pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.
no-abbrev-commit
Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates
abbrev-commit and those options which imply it such as "oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable. oneline
This is a shorthand for "pretty=oneline abbrev-commit" used together. encoding[=
] The commit objects record the encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the
user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. notes[=]
Show the notes (see git-notes(1)) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no pretty, format nor oneline option given on the command line. By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding
environment overrides). See git-config(1) for more details. With an optional argument, show this notes ref instead of the default notes ref(s). The ref is taken to be in refs/notes/ if it is not qualified. Multiple notes options can be combined to control which notes are being displayed. Examples: "notes=foo" will show only notes from "refs/notes/foo"; "notes=foo notes" will show both notes from "refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).
no-notes Do not show notes. This negates the above notes option, by resetting the list of notes refs from which notes are shown. Options are parsed in the order given on the command line, so e.g.
"notes notes=foo no-notes notes=bar" will only show notes from "refs/notes/bar".