git-log(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | PRETTY FORMATS | DIFF FORMATTING | GENERATING PATCH TEXT WITH -P | COMBINED DIFF FORMAT | EXAMPLES | DISCUSSION | CONFIGURATION | GIT | COLOPHON

GIT-LOG(1)                     Git Manual                     GIT-LOG(1)

NAME         top

       git-log - Show commit logs

SYNOPSIS         top

       git log [<options>] [<revision-range>] [[--] <path>...]

DESCRIPTION         top

       Shows the commit logs.

       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 reachable from
       any of the commits given on the command line form a set, 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 log foo bar ^baz

       means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar,
       but not from baz".

       A special notation "<commit1>..<commit2>" can be used as a
       short-hand for "^<commit1> <commit2>". For example, either of the
       following may be used interchangeably:

           $ git log origin..HEAD
           $ git log HEAD ^origin

       Another special notation is "<commit1>...<commit2>" 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 log A B --not $(git merge-base --all A B)
           $ git log A...B

       The command takes options applicable to the git-rev-list(1)
       command to control what is shown and how, and options applicable
       to the git-diff(1) command to control how the changes each commit
       introduces are shown.

OPTIONS         top

       --follow
           Continue listing the history of a file beyond renames (works
           only for a single file).

       --no-decorate, --decorate[=short|full|auto|no]
           Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown. If
           short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/,
           refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is
           specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be
           printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to
           a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given,
           otherwise no ref names are shown. The option --decorate is
           short-hand for --decorate=short. Default to configuration
           value of log.decorate if configured, otherwise, auto.

       --decorate-refs=<pattern>, --decorate-refs-exclude=<pattern>
           For each candidate reference, do not use it for decoration if
           it matches any patterns given to --decorate-refs-exclude or
           if it doesn’t match any of the patterns given to
           --decorate-refs. The log.excludeDecoration config option
           allows excluding refs from the decorations, but an explicit
           --decorate-refs pattern will override a match in
           log.excludeDecoration.

           If none of these options or config settings are given, then
           references are used as decoration if they match HEAD,
           refs/heads/, refs/remotes/, refs/stash/, or refs/tags/.

       --clear-decorations
           When specified, this option clears all previous
           --decorate-refs or --decorate-refs-exclude options and
           relaxes the default decoration filter to include all
           references. This option is assumed if the config value
           log.initialDecorationSet is set to all.

       --source
           Print out the ref name given on the command line by which
           each commit was reached.

       --[no-]mailmap, --[no-]use-mailmap
           Use mailmap file to map author and committer names and email
           addresses to canonical real names and email addresses. See
           git-shortlog(1).

       --full-diff
           Without this flag, git log -p <path>...  shows commits that
           touch the specified paths, and diffs about the same specified
           paths. With this, the full diff is shown for commits that
           touch the specified paths; this means that "<path>..." limits
           only commits, and doesn’t limit diff for those commits.

           Note that this affects all diff-based output types, e.g.
           those produced by --stat, etc.

       --log-size
           Include a line “log size <number>” in the output for each
           commit, where <number> is the length of that commit’s message
           in bytes. Intended to speed up tools that read log messages
           from git log output by allowing them to allocate space in
           advance.

       -L<start>,<end>:<file>, -L:<funcname>:<file>
           Trace the evolution of the line range given by <start>,<end>,
           or by the function name regex <funcname>, within the <file>.
           You may not give any pathspec limiters. This is currently
           limited to a walk starting from a single revision, i.e., you
           may only give zero or one positive revision arguments, and
           <start> and <end> (or <funcname>) must exist in the starting
           revision. You can specify this option more than once. Implies
           --patch. Patch output can be suppressed using --no-patch, but
           other diff formats (namely --raw, --numstat, --shortstat,
           --dirstat, --summary, --name-only, --name-status, --check)
           are not currently implemented.

           <start> and <end> can take one of these forms:

           •   number

               If <start> or <end> is a number, it specifies an absolute
               line number (lines count from 1).

           •   /regex/

               This form will use the first line matching the given
               POSIX regex. If <start> is a regex, it will search from
               the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from
               the start of file. If <start> is ^/regex/, it will search
               from the start of file. If <end> is a regex, it will
               search starting at the line given by <start>.

           •   +offset or -offset

               This is only valid for <end> and will specify a number of
               lines before or after the line given by <start>.

           If :<funcname> is given in place of <start> and <end>, it is
           a regular expression that denotes the range from the first
           funcname line that matches <funcname>, up to the next
           funcname line.  :<funcname> searches from the end of the
           previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file.
           ^:<funcname> searches from the start of file. The function
           names are determined in the same way as git diff works out
           patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in
           gitattributes(5)).

       <revision-range>
           Show only commits in the specified revision range. When no
           <revision-range> is specified, it defaults to HEAD (i.e. the
           whole history leading to the current commit).  origin..HEAD
           specifies all the commits reachable from the current commit
           (i.e.  HEAD), but not from origin. For a complete list of
           ways to spell <revision-range>, see the Specifying Ranges
           section of gitrevisions(7).

       [--] <path>...
           Show only commits that are enough to explain how the files
           that match the specified paths came to be. See History
           Simplification below for details and other simplification
           modes.

           Paths may need to be prefixed with -- to separate them from
           options or the revision range, when confusion arises.

   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=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using
       it with --grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log
       message has a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise
       noted.

       Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting
       options, such as --reverse.

       -<number>, -n <number>, --max-count=<number>
           Limit the number of commits to output.

       --skip=<number>
           Skip number commits before starting to show the commit
           output.

       --since=<date>, --after=<date>
           Show commits more recent than a specific date.

       --since-as-filter=<date>
           Show all commits more recent than a specific date. This
           visits all commits in the range, rather than stopping at the
           first commit which is older than a specific date.

       --until=<date>, --before=<date>
           Show commits older than a specific date.

       --author=<pattern>, --committer=<pattern>
           Limit the commits output to ones with author/committer header
           lines that match the specified pattern (regular expression).
           With more than one --author=<pattern>, commits whose author
           matches any of the given patterns are chosen (similarly for
           multiple --committer=<pattern>).

       --grep-reflog=<pattern>
           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=<pattern>
           Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that
           matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more
           than one --grep=<pattern>, commits whose message matches any
           of the given patterns are chosen (but see --all-match).

           When --notes is in effect, the message from the notes is
           matched as if it were 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.

       --invert-grep
           Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that do
           not match the pattern specified with --grep=<pattern>.

       -i, --regexp-ignore-case
           Match the regular expression limiting patterns without regard
           to letter 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).

       -P, --perl-regexp
           Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regular
           expressions.

           Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional
           compile-time dependency. If Git wasn’t compiled with support
           for them providing this option will cause it to die.

       --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=<number>, --max-parents=<number>, --no-min-parents,
       --no-max-parents
           Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many
           parent 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
           When finding commits to include, 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.

           This option also changes default diff format for merge
           commits to first-parent, see --diff-merges=first-parent for
           details.

       --exclude-first-parent-only
           When finding commits to exclude (with a ^), follow only the
           first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This can be
           used to find the set of changes in a topic branch from the
           point where it diverged from the remote branch, given that
           arbitrary merges can be valid topic branch changes.

       --not
           Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof) for
           all following revision specifiers, up to the next --not. When
           used on the command line before --stdin, the revisions passed
           through stdin will not be affected by it. Conversely, when
           passed via standard input, the revisions passed on the
           command line will not be affected by it.

       --all
           Pretend as if all the refs in refs/, along with HEAD, are
           listed on the command line as <commit>.

       --branches[=<pattern>]
           Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed on the
           command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit
           branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks
           ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.

       --tags[=<pattern>]
           Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed on the
           command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit tags
           to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or
           [, /* at the end is implied.

       --remotes[=<pattern>]
           Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the
           command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit
           remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob.
           If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.

       --glob=<glob-pattern>
           Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob <glob-pattern>
           are listed on the command line as <commit>. Leading refs/, is
           automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *, or
           [, /* at the end is implied.

       --exclude=<glob-pattern>
           Do not include refs matching <glob-pattern> that the next
           --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would
           otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate
           exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags,
           --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do
           not clear accumulated patterns).

           The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads,
           refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches,
           --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with
           refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is
           intended, it must be given explicitly.

       --exclude-hidden=[fetch|receive|uploadpack]
           Do not include refs that would be hidden by git-fetch,
           git-receive-pack or git-upload-pack by consulting the
           appropriate fetch.hideRefs, receive.hideRefs or
           uploadpack.hideRefs configuration along with
           transfer.hideRefs (see git-config(1)). This option affects
           the next pseudo-ref option --all or --glob and is cleared
           after processing them.

       --reflog
           Pretend as if all objects mentioned by reflogs are listed on
           the command line as <commit>.

       --alternate-refs
           Pretend as if all objects mentioned as ref tips of alternate
           repositories were listed on the command line. An alternate
           repository is any repository whose object directory is
           specified in objects/info/alternates. The set of included
           objects may be modified by core.alternateRefsCommand, etc.
           See git-config(1).

       --single-worktree
           By default, all working trees will be examined by the
           following options when there are more than one (see
           git-worktree(1)): --all, --reflog and --indexed-objects. This
           option forces them to examine the current working tree only.

       --ignore-missing
           Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as
           if the bad input was not given.

       --bisect
           Pretend as if the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad was
           listed and as if it was followed by --not and the good
           bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* on the command line.

       --stdin
           In addition to getting arguments from the command line, read
           them from standard input as well. This accepts commits and
           pseudo-options like --all and --glob=. When a -- separator is
           seen, the following input is treated as paths and used to
           limit the result. Flags like --not which are read via
           standard input are only respected for arguments passed in the
           same way and will not influence any subsequent command line
           arguments.

       --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). However, it 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
           difference, 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, and commit1...commit2
           notations cannot be used).

           With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for
           obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra
           lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog
           designator in the output may be shown as ref@{<Nth>} (where
           <Nth> is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as
           ref@{<timestamp>} (with the <timestamp> for that entry),
           depending on a few rules:

            1. If the starting point is specified as ref@{<Nth>}, show
               the index format.

            2. If the starting point was specified as ref@{now}, show
               the timestamp format.

            3. If neither was used, but --date was given on the command
               line, show the timestamp in the format requested by
               --date.

            4. Otherwise, show the index format.

           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).

           Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown
           at all.

       --merge
           Show commits touching conflicted paths in the range
           HEAD...<other>, where <other> is the first existing pseudoref
           in MERGE_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD, REVERT_HEAD or REBASE_HEAD.
           Only works when the index has unmerged entries. This option
           can be used to show relevant commits when resolving conflicts
           from a 3-way merge.

       --boundary
           Output excluded boundary commits. Boundary commits are
           prefixed with -.

   History Simplification
       Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for
       example the commits modifying a particular <path>. 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:

       <paths>
           Commits modifying the given <paths> 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)

       --show-pulls
           Include all commits from the default mode, but also any merge
           commits that are not TREESAME to the first parent but are
           TREESAME to a later parent. This mode is helpful for showing
           the merge commits that "first introduced" a change to a
           branch.

       --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[=<commit>]
           When given a range of commits to display (e.g.
           commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), only display commits
           in that range that are ancestors of <commit>, descendants of
           <commit>, or <commit> itself. If no commit is specified, use
           commit1 (the excluded part of the range) as <commit>. Can be
           passed multiple times; if so, a commit is included if it is
           any of the commits given or if it is an ancestor or
           descendant of one of them.

       A more detailed explanation follows.

       Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. 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---Q
                    /     /   /   /   /   /
                   I     B   C   D   E   Y
                    \   /   /   /   /   /
                     `-------------'   X

       The horizontal line of history A---Q 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”.  P is TREESAME to O, but not to E.

       •   X is an independent root commit that added a new file side,
           and Y modified it.  Y is TREESAME to X. Its merge Q added
           side to P, and Q is TREESAME to P, but not to Y.

       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  Q

           M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents.  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---Q
                        /     /   /   /   /
                       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, and X, Y and Q.

       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 or that are root commits TREESAME to an empty
               tree, and remove duplicates, but take care to never drop
               all parents that we are TREESAME to.

           •   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, P, and Q 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.

           •   Q's parent list had Y simplified to X.  X was then
               removed, because it was a TREESAME root.  Q was then
               removed completely, because it had one parent and is
               TREESAME.

       There is another simplification mode available:

       --ancestry-path[=<commit>]
           Limit the displayed commits to those which are an ancestor of
           <commit>, or which are a descendant of <commit>, or are
           <commit> itself.

           As an example use case, consider the following commit
           history:

                           D---E-------F
                          /     \       \
                         B---C---G---H---I---J
                        /                     \
                       A-------K---------------L--M

           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
                                              \
                                               L--M

           We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path
           which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but
           is just more explicit.

           If we instead are interested in a given topic within this
           range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only
           want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in
           their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for
           example would result in:

                               E
                                \
                                 G---H---I---J
                                              \
                                               L--M

           Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

                               K---------------L--M

       Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create
       a new example history.

       A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is
       that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in
       the file’s simplified history. Let’s demonstrate a new example
       and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges
       works in that case:

                     .-A---M-----C--N---O---P
                    /     / \  \  \/   /   /
                   I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /
                    \   /     \/         /
                     \ /      /\        /
                      `---X--'  `---Y--'

       For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified
       by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z,
       and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by
       resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B
       and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however,
       was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking
       only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but
       not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to
       take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not
       C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents,
       but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

       When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent,
       so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The
       resulting history graph is:

                   I---X

       When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will
       discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will
       reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the
       resulting graph is:

                     .-A---M--------N---O---P
                    /     / \  \  \/   /   /
                   I     B   \  R-'`--'   /
                    \   /     \/         /
                     \ /      /\        /
                      `---X--'  `------'

       Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they
       did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only
       merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt.
       This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where
       many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches
       along a single trunk: many unrelated merges appear in the
       --full-history results.

       When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P
       disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second
       parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those
       edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent
       commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to
       the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

                     .-A---M--.
                    /     /    \
                   I     B      R
                    \   /      /
                     \ /      /
                      `---X--'

       In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes
       from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and
       the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough
       information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared"
       from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues
       with this approach.

       The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the
       --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit
       history before returning a single result. This can make the
       option difficult to use for very large repositories.

       The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are
       working on the same repository, it is important which merge
       commits introduced a change into an important branch. The
       problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit
       that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the
       merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This
       commit may have information about why the change X came to
       override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

       --show-pulls
           In addition to the commits shown in the default history, show
           each merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent
           but is TREESAME to a later parent.

           When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is
           treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch.
           When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other
           options) the resulting graph is:

                       I---X---R---N

           Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they
           pulled the commits X and R into the base branch,
           respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B
           do not appear in the default history.

           When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph
           includes all of the necessary information:

                         .-A---M--.   N
                        /     /    \ /
                       I     B      R
                        \   /      /
                         \ /      /
                          `---X--'

           Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M
           was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history
           as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into
           the main branch.

       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).

   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.

       --author-date-order
           Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but
           otherwise show commits in the author 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:

                   ---1----2----4----7
                       \              \
                        3----5----6----8---

           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 chosen to be shown (see Commit Limiting
           section above) in reverse order. Cannot be combined with
           --walk-reflogs.

   Object Traversal
       These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git
       repositories.

       --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 shown in the
           order they were given on the command line. Otherwise (if
           sorted or no argument was given), the commits are shown in
           reverse chronological order by commit time. Cannot be
           combined with --graph.

       --do-walk
           Overrides a previous --no-walk.

   Commit Formatting
       --pretty[=<format>], --format=<format>
           Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given
           format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium,
           full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format:<string> and
           tformat:<string>. When <format> is none of the above, and has
           %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat:<format>
           were given.

           See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details
           for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it 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 a prefix that names the object uniquely.
           "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is
           displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length
           of the prefix.

           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, either explicit or implied by other
           options such as "--oneline". It also overrides the
           log.abbrevCommit variable.

       --oneline
           This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit"
           used together.

       --encoding=<encoding>
           Commit objects record the character 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. Note that if an object claims to be
           encoded in X and we are outputting in X, we will output the
           object verbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the
           original commit may be copied to the output. Likewise, if
           iconv(3) fails to convert the commit, we will quietly output
           the original object verbatim.

       --expand-tabs=<n>, --expand-tabs, --no-expand-tabs
           Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces
           to fill to the next display column that is a multiple of <n>)
           in the log message before showing it in the output.
           --expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=8, and
           --no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=0, which
           disables tab expansion.

           By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent
           the log message by 4 spaces (i.e.  medium, which is the
           default, full, and fuller).

       --notes[=<ref>]
           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, or --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 <ref> argument, use the ref to find the
           notes to display. The ref can specify the full refname when
           it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/
           and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form the full name
           of the ref.

           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".

       --show-notes-by-default
           Show the default notes unless options for displaying specific
           notes are given.

       --show-notes[=<ref>], --[no-]standard-notes
           These options are deprecated. Use the above
           --notes/--no-notes options instead.

       --show-signature
           Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the
           signature to gpg --verify and show the output.

       --relative-date
           Synonym for --date=relative.

       --date=<format>
           Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format,
           such as when using --pretty.  log.date config variable sets a
           default value for the log command’s --date option. By
           default, dates are shown in the original time zone (either
           committer’s or author’s). If -local is appended to the format
           (e.g., iso-local), the user’s local time zone is used
           instead.

           --date=relative shows dates relative to the current time,
           e.g. “2 hours ago”. The -local option has no effect for
           --date=relative.

           --date=local is an alias for --date=default-local.

           --date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO
           8601-like format. The differences to the strict ISO 8601
           format are:

           •   a space instead of the T date/time delimiter

           •   a space between time and time zone

           •   no colon between hours and minutes of the time zone

           --date=iso-strict (or --date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps
           in strict ISO 8601 format.

           --date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822
           format, often found in email messages.

           --date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in
           YYYY-MM-DD format.

           --date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch
           (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the
           timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits;
           the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes).
           I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s
           %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the
           seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC),
           but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

           --date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not
           match the current time-zone, and doesn’t print the whole date
           if that matches (ie skip printing year for dates that are
           "this year", but also skip the whole date itself if it’s in
           the last few days and we can just say what weekday it was).
           For older dates the hour and minute is also omitted.

           --date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds
           since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and
           therefore -local has no effect.

           --date=format:...  feeds the format ...  to your system
           strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled
           internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your
           system locale’s preferred format. See the strftime manual for
           a complete list of format placeholders. When using -local,
           the correct syntax is --date=format-local:....

           --date=default is the default format, and is based on
           ctime(3) output. It shows a single line with three-letter day
           of the week, three-letter month, day-of-month,
           hour-minute-seconds in "HH:MM:SS" format, followed by 4-digit
           year, plus timezone information, unless the local time zone
           is used, e.g.  Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000.

       --parents
           Print also the parents of the commit (in the form "commit
           parent..."). Also enables parent rewriting, see History
           Simplification above.

       --children
           Print also the children of the commit (in the form "commit
           child..."). Also enables parent rewriting, see History
           Simplification above.

       --left-right
           Mark which side of a symmetric difference a commit is
           reachable from. Commits from the left side are prefixed with
           < and those from the right with >. If combined with
           --boundary, those commits are prefixed with -.

           For example, if you have this topology:

                            y---b---b  branch B
                           / \ /
                          /   .
                         /   / \
                        o---x---a---a  branch A

           you would get an output like this:

                       $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B

                       >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
                       >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
                       <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
                       <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
                       -yyyyyyy... 1st on b
                       -xxxxxxx... 1st on a

       --graph
           Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit
           history on the left hand side of the output. This may cause
           extra lines to be printed in between commits, in order for
           the graph history to be drawn properly. Cannot be combined
           with --no-walk.

           This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification
           above.

           This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the
           --date-order option may also be specified.

       --show-linear-break[=<barrier>]
           When --graph is not used, all history branches are flattened
           which can make it hard to see that the two consecutive
           commits do not belong to a linear branch. This option puts a
           barrier in between them in that case. If <barrier> is
           specified, it is the string that will be shown instead of the
           default one.

PRETTY FORMATS         top

       If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not
       oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the
       Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the hashes of
       ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the
       listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct
       parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for
       example, if you are only interested in changes related to a
       certain directory or file.

       There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional
       formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either
       another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see
       git-config(1)). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

       •   oneline

               <hash> <title-line>

           This is designed to be as compact as possible.

       •   short

               commit <hash>
               Author: <author>

               <title-line>

       •   medium

               commit <hash>
               Author: <author>
               Date:   <author-date>

               <title-line>

               <full-commit-message>

       •   full

               commit <hash>
               Author: <author>
               Commit: <committer>

               <title-line>

               <full-commit-message>

       •   fuller

               commit <hash>
               Author:     <author>
               AuthorDate: <author-date>
               Commit:     <committer>
               CommitDate: <committer-date>

               <title-line>

               <full-commit-message>

       •   reference

               <abbrev-hash> (<title-line>, <short-author-date>)

           This format is used to refer to another commit in a commit
           message and is the same as --pretty='format:%C(auto)%h (%s,
           %ad)'. By default, the date is formatted with --date=short
           unless another --date option is explicitly specified. As with
           any format: with format placeholders, its output is not
           affected by other options like --decorate and --walk-reflogs.

       •   email

               From <hash> <date>
               From: <author>
               Date: <author-date>
               Subject: [PATCH] <title-line>

               <full-commit-message>

       •   mboxrd

           Like email, but lines in the commit message starting with
           "From " (preceded by zero or more ">") are quoted with ">" so
           they aren’t confused as starting a new commit.

       •   raw

           The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in
           the commit object. Notably, the hashes are displayed in full,
           regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and
           parents information show the true parent commits, without
           taking grafts or history simplification into account. Note
           that this format affects the way commits are displayed, but
           not the way the diff is shown e.g. with git log --raw. To get
           full object names in a raw diff format, use --no-abbrev.

       •   format:<format-string>

           The format:<format-string> format allows you to specify which
           information you want to show. It works a little bit like
           printf format, with the notable exception that you get a
           newline with %n instead of \n.

           E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was
           >>%s<<%n" would show something like this:

               The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
               The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

           The placeholders are:

           •   Placeholders that expand to a single literal character:

               %n
                   newline

               %%
                   a raw %

               %x00
                   %x followed by two hexadecimal digits is replaced
                   with a byte with the hexadecimal digits' value (we
                   will call this "literal formatting code" in the rest
                   of this document).

           •   Placeholders that affect formatting of later
               placeholders:

               %Cred
                   switch color to red

               %Cgreen
                   switch color to green

               %Cblue
                   switch color to blue

               %Creset
                   reset color

               %C(...)
                   color specification, as described under Values in the
                   "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of git-config(1). By
                   default, colors are shown only when enabled for log
                   output (by color.diff, color.ui, or --color, and
                   respecting the auto settings of the former if we are
                   going to a terminal).  %C(auto,...)  is accepted as a
                   historical synonym for the default (e.g.,
                   %C(auto,red)). Specifying %C(always,...)  will show
                   the colors even when color is not otherwise enabled
                   (though consider just using --color=always to enable
                   color for the whole output, including this format and
                   anything else git might color).  auto alone (i.e.
                   %C(auto)) will turn on auto coloring on the next
                   placeholders until the color is switched again.

               %m
                   left (<), right (>) or boundary (-) mark

               %w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])
                   switch line wrapping, like the -w option of
                   git-shortlog(1).

               %<( <N> [,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])
                   make the next placeholder take at least N column
                   widths, padding spaces on the right if necessary.
                   Optionally truncate (with ellipsis ..) at the left
                   (ltrunc) ..ft, the middle (mtrunc) mi..le, or the end
                   (trunc) rig.., if the output is longer than N
                   columns. Note 1: that truncating only works correctly
                   with N >= 2. Note 2: spaces around the N and M (see
                   below) values are optional. Note 3: Emojis and other
                   wide characters will take two display columns, which
                   may over-run column boundaries. Note 4: decomposed
                   character combining marks may be misplaced at padding
                   boundaries.

               %<|( <M> )
                   make the next placeholder take at least until Mth
                   display column, padding spaces on the right if
                   necessary. Use negative M values for column positions
                   measured from the right hand edge of the terminal
                   window.

               %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> )
                   similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but
                   padding spaces on the left

               %>>( <N> ), %>>|( <M> )
                   similar to %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> ) respectively, except
                   that if the next placeholder takes more spaces than
                   given and there are spaces on its left, use those
                   spaces

               %><( <N> ), %><|( <M> )
                   similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but
                   padding both sides (i.e. the text is centered)

           •   Placeholders that expand to information extracted from
               the commit:

               %H
                   commit hash

               %h
                   abbreviated commit hash

               %T
                   tree hash

               %t
                   abbreviated tree hash

               %P
                   parent hashes

               %p
                   abbreviated parent hashes

               %an
                   author name

               %aN
                   author name (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1)
                   or git-blame(1))

               %ae
                   author email

               %aE
                   author email (respecting .mailmap, see
                   git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %al
                   author email local-part (the part before the @ sign)

               %aL
                   author local-part (see %al) respecting .mailmap, see
                   git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %ad
                   author date (format respects --date= option)

               %aD
                   author date, RFC2822 style

               %ar
                   author date, relative

               %at
                   author date, UNIX timestamp

               %ai
                   author date, ISO 8601-like format

               %aI
                   author date, strict ISO 8601 format

               %as
                   author date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)

               %ah
                   author date, human style (like the --date=human
                   option of git-rev-list(1))

               %cn
                   committer name

               %cN
                   committer name (respecting .mailmap, see
                   git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %ce
                   committer email

               %cE
                   committer email (respecting .mailmap, see
                   git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %cl
                   committer email local-part (the part before the @
                   sign)

               %cL
                   committer local-part (see %cl) respecting .mailmap,
                   see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %cd
                   committer date (format respects --date= option)

               %cD
                   committer date, RFC2822 style

               %cr
                   committer date, relative

               %ct
                   committer date, UNIX timestamp

               %ci
                   committer date, ISO 8601-like format

               %cI
                   committer date, strict ISO 8601 format

               %cs
                   committer date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)

               %ch
                   committer date, human style (like the --date=human
                   option of git-rev-list(1))

               %d
                   ref names, like the --decorate option of git-log(1)

               %D
                   ref names without the " (", ")" wrapping.

               %(decorate[:<options>])
                   ref names with custom decorations. The decorate
                   string may be followed by a colon and zero or more
                   comma-separated options. Option values may contain
                   literal formatting codes. These must be used for
                   commas (%x2C) and closing parentheses (%x29), due to
                   their role in the option syntax.

                   •   prefix=<value>: Shown before the list of ref
                       names. Defaults to " (".

                   •   suffix=<value>: Shown after the list of ref
                       names. Defaults to ")".

                   •   separator=<value>: Shown between ref names.
                       Defaults to ", ".

                   •   pointer=<value>: Shown between HEAD and the
                       branch it points to, if any. Defaults to " -> ".

                   •   tag=<value>: Shown before tag names. Defaults to
                       "tag: ".

                   For example, to produce decorations with no wrapping
                   or tag annotations, and spaces as separators:

                   %(decorate:prefix=,suffix=,tag=,separator= )

               %(describe[:<options>])
                   human-readable name, like git-describe(1); empty
                   string for undescribable commits. The describe string
                   may be followed by a colon and zero or more
                   comma-separated options. Descriptions can be
                   inconsistent when tags are added or removed at the
                   same time.

                   •   tags[=<bool-value>]: Instead of only considering
                       annotated tags, consider lightweight tags as
                       well.

                   •   abbrev=<number>: Instead of using the default
                       number of hexadecimal digits (which will vary
                       according to the number of objects in the
                       repository with a default of 7) of the
                       abbreviated object name, use <number> digits, or
                       as many digits as needed to form a unique object
                       name.

                   •   match=<pattern>: Only consider tags matching the
                       given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/"
                       prefix.

                   •   exclude=<pattern>: Do not consider tags matching
                       the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the
                       "refs/tags/" prefix.

               %S
                   ref name given on the command line by which the
                   commit was reached (like git log --source), only
                   works with git log

               %e
                   encoding

               %s
                   subject

               %f
                   sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename

               %b
                   body

               %B
                   raw body (unwrapped subject and body)

               %N
                   commit notes

               %GG
                   raw verification message from GPG for a signed commit

               %G?
                   show "G" for a good (valid) signature, "B" for a bad
                   signature, "U" for a good signature with unknown
                   validity, "X" for a good signature that has expired,
                   "Y" for a good signature made by an expired key, "R"
                   for a good signature made by a revoked key, "E" if
                   the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key)
                   and "N" for no signature

               %GS
                   show the name of the signer for a signed commit

               %GK
                   show the key used to sign a signed commit

               %GF
                   show the fingerprint of the key used to sign a signed
                   commit

               %GP
                   show the fingerprint of the primary key whose subkey
                   was used to sign a signed commit

               %GT
                   show the trust level for the key used to sign a
                   signed commit

               %gD
                   reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1} or
                   refs/stash@{2 minutes ago}; the format follows the
                   rules described for the -g option. The portion before
                   the @ is the refname as given on the command line (so
                   git log -g refs/heads/master would yield
                   refs/heads/master@{0}).

               %gd
                   shortened reflog selector; same as %gD, but the
                   refname portion is shortened for human readability
                   (so refs/heads/master becomes just master).

               %gn
                   reflog identity name

               %gN
                   reflog identity name (respecting .mailmap, see
                   git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %ge
                   reflog identity email

               %gE
                   reflog identity email (respecting .mailmap, see
                   git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))

               %gs
                   reflog subject

               %(trailers[:<options>])
                   display the trailers of the body as interpreted by
                   git-interpret-trailers(1). The trailers string may be
                   followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated
                   options. If any option is provided multiple times,
                   the last occurrence wins.

                   •   key=<key>: only show trailers with specified
                       <key>. Matching is done case-insensitively and
                       trailing colon is optional. If option is given
                       multiple times trailer lines matching any of the
                       keys are shown. This option automatically enables
                       the only option so that non-trailer lines in the
                       trailer block are hidden. If that is not desired
                       it can be disabled with only=false. E.g.,
                       %(trailers:key=Reviewed-by) shows trailer lines
                       with key Reviewed-by.

                   •   only[=<bool>]: select whether non-trailer lines
                       from the trailer block should be included.

                   •   separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted
                       between trailer lines. Defaults to a line feed
                       character. The string <sep> may contain the
                       literal formatting codes described above. To use
                       comma as separator one must use %x2C as it would
                       otherwise be parsed as next option. E.g.,
                       %(trailers:key=Ticket,separator=%x2C ) shows all
                       trailer lines whose key is "Ticket" separated by
                       a comma and a space.

                   •   unfold[=<bool>]: make it behave as if
                       interpret-trailer’s --unfold option was given.
                       E.g., %(trailers:only,unfold=true) unfolds and
                       shows all trailer lines.

                   •   keyonly[=<bool>]: only show the key part of the
                       trailer.

                   •   valueonly[=<bool>]: only show the value part of
                       the trailer.

                   •   key_value_separator=<sep>: specify the separator
                       inserted between the key and value of each
                       trailer. Defaults to ": ". Otherwise it shares
                       the same semantics as separator=<sep> above.

           Note

           Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the
           revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog
           options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing
           reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d and %D
           placeholders will use the "short" decoration format if
           --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

       The boolean options accept an optional value [=<bool-value>]. The
       values true, false, on, off etc. are all accepted. See the
       "boolean" sub-section in "EXAMPLES" in git-config(1). If a
       boolean option is given with no value, it’s enabled.

       If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed
       is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the
       placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

       If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all
       consecutive line-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are
       deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty
       string.

       If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is
       inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the
       placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

       •   tformat:

           The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that
           it provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator"
           semantics. In other words, each commit has the message
           terminator character (usually a newline) appended, rather
           than a separator placed between entries. This means that the
           final entry of a single-line format will be properly
           terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format
           does. For example:

               $ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \
                 | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
               4da45be
               7134973 -- NO NEWLINE

               $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
                 | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
               4da45be
               7134973

           In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is
           interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it. For
           example, these two are equivalent:

               $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef
               $ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef

DIFF FORMATTING         top

       By default, git log does not generate any diff output. The
       options below can be used to show the changes made by each
       commit.

       Note that unless one of --diff-merges variants (including short
       -m, -c, --cc, and --dd options) is explicitly given, merge
       commits will not show a diff, even if a diff format like --patch
       is selected, nor will they match search options like -S. The
       exception is when --first-parent is in use, in which case
       first-parent is the default format for merge commits.

       -p, -u, --patch
           Generate patch (see the section called “GENERATING PATCH TEXT
           WITH -P”).

       -s, --no-patch
           Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for
           commands like git show that show the patch by default to
           squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like
           --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.

       -m
           Show diffs for merge commits in the default format. This is
           similar to --diff-merges=on, except -m will produce no output
           unless -p is given as well.

       -c
           Produce combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for
           --diff-merges=combined -p.

       --cc
           Produce dense combined diff output for merge commits.
           Shortcut for --diff-merges=dense-combined -p.

       --dd
           Produce diff with respect to first parent for both merge and
           regular commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=first-parent -p.

       --remerge-diff
           Produce remerge-diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for
           --diff-merges=remerge -p.

       --no-diff-merges
           Synonym for --diff-merges=off.

       --diff-merges=<format>
           Specify diff format to be used for merge commits. Default is
           off unless --first-parent is in use, in which case
           first-parent is the default.

           The following formats are supported:

           off, none
               Disable output of diffs for merge commits. Useful to
               override implied value.

           on, m
               Make diff output for merge commits to be shown in the
               default format. The default format can be changed using
               log.diffMerges configuration variable, whose default
               value is separate.

           first-parent, 1
               Show full diff with respect to first parent. This is the
               same format as --patch produces for non-merge commits.

           separate
               Show full diff with respect to each of parents. Separate
               log entry and diff is generated for each parent.

           combined, c
               Show differences from each of the parents to the merge
               result simultaneously instead of showing pairwise diff
               between a parent and the result one at a time.
               Furthermore, it lists only files which were modified from
               all parents.

           dense-combined, cc
               Further compress output produced by
               --diff-merges=combined by omitting uninteresting hunks
               whose contents in the parents have only two variants and
               the merge result picks one of them without modification.

           remerge, r
               Remerge two-parent merge commits to create a temporary
               tree object—potentially containing files with conflict
               markers and such. A diff is then shown between that
               temporary tree and the actual merge commit.

               The output emitted when this option is used is subject to
               change, and so is its interaction with other options
               (unless explicitly documented).

       --combined-all-paths
           This flag causes combined diffs (used for merge commits) to
           list the name of the file from all parents. It thus only has
           effect when --diff-merges=[dense-]combined is in use, and is
           likely only useful if filename changes are detected (i.e.
           when either rename or copy detection have been requested).

       -U<n>, --unified=<n>
           Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual
           three. Implies --patch.

       --output=<file>
           Output to a specific file instead of stdout.

       --output-indicator-new=<char>, --output-indicator-old=<char>,
       --output-indicator-context=<char>
           Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context
           lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' '
           respectively.

       --raw
           For each commit, show a summary of changes using the raw diff
           format. See the "RAW OUTPUT FORMAT" section of git-diff(1).
           This is different from showing the log itself in raw format,
           which you can achieve with --format=raw.

       --patch-with-raw
           Synonym for -p --raw.

       -t
           Show the tree objects in the diff output.

       --indent-heuristic
           Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make
           patches easier to read. This is the default.

       --no-indent-heuristic
           Disable the indent heuristic.

       --minimal
           Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is
           produced.

       --patience
           Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.

       --histogram
           Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.

       --anchored=<text>
           Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

           This option may be specified more than once.

           If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists
           only once, and starts with this text, this algorithm attempts
           to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the
           output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

       --diff-algorithm={patience|minimal|histogram|myers}
           Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

           default, myers
               The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the
               default.

           minimal
               Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff
               is produced.

           patience
               Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.

           histogram
               This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support
               low-occurrence common elements".

           For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable
           to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then
           you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

       --stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]
           Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary
           will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the
           graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80
           columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden
           by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by
           giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting
           diff.statNameWidth=<width>. The width of the graph part can
           be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<width> or by setting
           diff.statGraphWidth=<width>. Using --stat or
           --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat
           graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or
           diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By
           giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to
           the first <count> lines, followed by ...  if there are more.

           These parameters can also be set individually with
           --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and
           --stat-count=<count>.

       --compact-summary
           Output a condensed summary of extended header information
           such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone",
           optionally "+l" if it’s a symlink) and mode changes ("+x" or
           "-x" for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in
           diffstat. The information is put between the filename part
           and the graph part. Implies --stat.

       --numstat
           Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted
           lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation,
           to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs
           two - instead of saying 0 0.

       --shortstat
           Output only the last line of the --stat format containing
           total number of modified files, as well as number of added
           and deleted lines.

       -X[<param1,param2,...>], --dirstat[=<param1,param2,...>]
           Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for
           each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be
           customized by passing it a comma separated list of
           parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat
           configuration variable (see git-config(1)). The following
           parameters are available:

           changes
               Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that
               have been removed from the source, or added to the
               destination. This ignores the amount of pure code
               movements within a file. In other words, rearranging
               lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes.
               This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.

           lines
               Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular
               line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added
               line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks
               instead, since binary files have no natural concept of
               lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than
               the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines
               within a file as much as other changes. The resulting
               output is consistent with what you get from the other
               --*stat options.

           files
               Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of
               files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the
               dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest
               --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the
               file contents at all.

           cumulative
               Count changes in a child directory for the parent
               directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the
               sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The
               default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with
               the noncumulative parameter.

           <limit>
               An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by
               default). Directories contributing less than this
               percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

           Example: The following will count changed files, while
           ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount
           of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in
           the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

       --cumulative
           Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative

       --dirstat-by-file[=<param1,param2>...]
           Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param1>,<param2>...

       --summary
           Output a condensed summary of extended header information
           such as creations, renames and mode changes.

       --patch-with-stat
           Synonym for -p --stat.

       -z
           Separate the commits with NULs instead of newlines.

           Also, when --raw or --numstat has been given, do not munge
           pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

           Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are
           quoted as explained for the configuration variable
           core.quotePath (see git-config(1)).

       --name-only
           Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image
           tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more
           information see the discussion about encoding in the
           git-log(1) manual page.

       --name-status
           Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See
           the description of the --diff-filter option on what the
           status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are
           often encoded in UTF-8.

       --submodule[=<format>]
           Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When
           specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This
           format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning
           and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is
           specified, the log format is used. This format lists the
           commits in the range like git-submodule(1) summary does. When
           --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This
           format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule
           contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule
           or the short format if the config option is unset.

       --color[=<when>]
           Show colored diff.  --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the
           same as --color=always.  <when> can be one of always, never,
           or auto.

       --no-color
           Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.

       --color-moved[=<mode>]
           Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode>
           defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the
           option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

           no
               Moved lines are not highlighted.

           default
               Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more
               sensible mode in the future.

           plain
               Any line that is added in one location and was removed in
               another location will be colored with
               color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will
               be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else
               in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is
               not very useful in a review to determine if a block of
               code was moved without permutation.

           blocks
               Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric
               characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are
               painted using either the color.diff.{old,new}Moved color.
               Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.

           zebra
               Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The
               blocks are painted using either the
               color.diff.{old,new}Moved color or
               color.diff.{old,new}MovedAlternative. The change between
               the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.

           dimmed-zebra
               Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting
               parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of
               two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest
               is uninteresting.  dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.

       --no-color-moved
           Turn off move detection. This can be used to override
           configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.

       --color-moved-ws=<modes>
           This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the
           move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as
           a comma separated list:

           no
               Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.

           ignore-space-at-eol
               Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.

           ignore-space-change
               Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores
               whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences
               of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.

           ignore-all-space
               Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores
               differences even if one line has whitespace where the
               other line has none.

           allow-indentation-change
               Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection,
               then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the
               change in whitespace is the same per line. This is
               incompatible with the other modes.

       --no-color-moved-ws
           Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This
           can be used to override configuration settings. It is the
           same as --color-moved-ws=no.

       --word-diff[=<mode>]
           Show a word diff, using the <mode> to delimit changed words.
           By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see
           --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and
           must be one of:

           color
               Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies
               --color.

           plain
               Show words as [-removed-] and {+added+}. Makes no
               attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the
               input, so the output may be ambiguous.

           porcelain
               Use a special line-based format intended for script
               consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in
               the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` `
               character at the beginning of the line and extending to
               the end of the line. Newlines in the input are
               represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.

           none
               Disable word diff again.

           Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used
           to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

       --word-diff-regex=<regex>
           Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering
           runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff
           unless it was already enabled.

           Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a
           word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace
           and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You
           may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression
           to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A
           match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the
           newline.

           For example, --word-diff-regex=.  will treat each character
           as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by
           character.

           The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration
           option, see gitattributes(5) or git-config(1). Giving it
           explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration
           setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

       --color-words[=<regex>]
           Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was
           specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.

       --no-renames
           Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file
           gives the default to do so.

       --[no-]rename-empty
           Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.

       --check
           Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace
           errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled
           by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing
           whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of
           whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately
           followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the
           line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero
           status if problems are found. Not compatible with
           --exit-code.

       --ws-error-highlight=<kind>
           Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines
           of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none
           resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all
           is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not
           given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight
           is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are
           highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with
           color.diff.whitespace.

       --full-index
           Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full
           pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line
           when generating patch format output.

       --binary
           In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be
           applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.

       --abbrev[=<n>]
           Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name
           in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show
           the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that
           uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format,
           --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is
           specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of
           --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with
           --abbrev=<n>.

       -B[<n>][/<m>], --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]
           Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and
           create. This serves two purposes:

           It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite
           of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed
           together with a very few lines that happen to match textually
           as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old
           followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the
           number m controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to
           60%).  -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original
           should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total
           rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series
           of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

           When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also
           considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only
           considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename),
           and the number n controls this aspect of the -B option
           (defaults to 50%).  -B20% specifies that a change with
           addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file’s
           size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of
           a rename to another file.

       -M[<n>], --find-renames[=<n>]
           If generating diffs, detect and report renames for each
           commit. For following files across renames while traversing
           history, see --follow. If n is specified, it is a threshold
           on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions
           compared to the file’s size). For example, -M90% means Git
           should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than
           90% of the file hasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number
           is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it.
           I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%.
           Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to
           exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is
           50%.

       -C[<n>], --find-copies[=<n>]
           Detect copies as well as renames. See also
           --find-copies-harder. If n is specified, it has the same
           meaning as for -M<n>.

       --find-copies-harder
           For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies
           only if the original file of the copy was modified in the
           same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect
           unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This
           is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it
           with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same
           effect.

       -D, --irreversible-delete
           Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but
           not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The
           resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git
           apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate
           on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the
           output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a
           patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the
           option.

           When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the
           deletion part of a delete/create pair.

       -l<num>
           The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can
           detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an
           exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining
           unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames,
           only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all
           original sources are relevant.) For N sources and
           destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option
           prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from
           running if the number of source/destination files involved
           exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit.
           Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.

       --diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]
           Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted
           (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular
           file, symlink, submodule, ...) changed (T), are Unmerged (U),
           are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any
           combination of the filter characters (including none) can be
           used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all
           paths are selected if there is any file that matches other
           criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches
           other criteria, nothing is selected.

           Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude.
           E.g.  --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

           Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance,
           copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for
           those types is disabled.

       -S<string>
           Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of
           the specified string (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file.
           Intended for the scripter’s use.

           It is useful when you’re looking for an exact block of code
           (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block
           since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively
           to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S,
           and keep going until you get the very first version of the
           block.

           Binary files are searched as well.

       -G<regex>
           Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed
           lines that match <regex>.

           To illustrate the difference between -S<regex>
           --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the
           following diff in the same file:

               +    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
               ...
               -    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

           While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git
           log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the
           number of occurrences of that string did not change).

           Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a
           textconv filter will be ignored.

           See the pickaxe entry in gitdiffcore(7) for more information.

       --find-object=<object-id>
           Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of
           the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is
           different in that it doesn’t search for a specific string but
           for a specific object id.

           The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies
           the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

       --pickaxe-all
           When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that
           changeset, not just the files that contain the change in
           <string>.

       --pickaxe-regex
           Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular
           expression to match.

       -O<orderfile>
           Control the order in which files appear in the output. This
           overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see
           git-config(1)). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

           The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns
           in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first
           pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match
           the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and
           so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern
           are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all
           pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have
           the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier
           patterns), their output order relative to each other is the
           normal order.

           <orderfile> is parsed as follows:

           •   Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as
               separators for readability.

           •   Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can
               be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the
               beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.

           •   Each other line contains a single pattern.

           Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used
           for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a
           pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the
           final pathname components matches the pattern. For example,
           the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and
           "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

       --skip-to=<file>, --rotate-to=<file>
           Discard the files before the named <file> from the output
           (i.e.  skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e.
           rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use
           of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful
           otherwise.

       -R
           Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or
           on-disk file to tree contents.

       --relative[=<path>], --no-relative
           When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told
           to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames
           relative to it with this option. When you are not in a
           subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which
           subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a
           <path> as an argument.  --no-relative can be used to
           countermand both diff.relative config option and previous
           --relative.

       -a, --text
           Treat all files as text.

       --ignore-cr-at-eol
           Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a
           comparison.

       --ignore-space-at-eol
           Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.

       -b, --ignore-space-change
           Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores
           whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of
           one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.

       -w, --ignore-all-space
           Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores
           differences even if one line has whitespace where the other
           line has none.

       --ignore-blank-lines
           Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.

       -I<regex>, --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
           Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may
           be specified more than once.

       --inter-hunk-context=<lines>
           Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified
           number of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each
           other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config
           option is unset.

       -W, --function-context
           Show whole function as context lines for each change. The
           function names are determined in the same way as git diff
           works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom
           hunk-header in gitattributes(5)).

       --ext-diff
           Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an
           external diff driver with gitattributes(5), you need to use
           this option with git-log(1) and friends.

       --no-ext-diff
           Disallow external diff drivers.

       --textconv, --no-textconv
           Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be
           run when comparing binary files. See gitattributes(5) for
           details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way
           conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human
           consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv
           filters are enabled by default only for git-diff(1) and
           git-log(1), but not for git-format-patch(1) or diff plumbing
           commands.

       --ignore-submodules[=<when>]
           Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. <when>
           can be either "none", "untracked", "dirty" or "all", which is
           the default. Using "none" will consider the submodule
           modified when it either contains untracked or modified files
           or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the
           superproject and can be used to override any settings of the
           ignore option in git-config(1) or gitmodules(5). When
           "untracked" is used submodules are not considered dirty when
           they only contain untracked content (but they are still
           scanned for modified content). Using "dirty" ignores all
           changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the
           commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the
           behavior until 1.7.0). Using "all" hides all changes to
           submodules.

       --src-prefix=<prefix>
           Show the given source prefix instead of "a/".

       --dst-prefix=<prefix>
           Show the given destination prefix instead of "b/".

       --no-prefix
           Do not show any source or destination prefix.

       --default-prefix
           Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and
           "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as
           diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and
           diff.mnemonicPrefix (see git-config(1)).

       --line-prefix=<prefix>
           Prepend an additional prefix to every line of output.

       --ita-invisible-in-index
           By default entries added by "git add -N" appear as an
           existing empty file in "git diff" and a new file in "git diff
           --cached". This option makes the entry appear as a new file
           in "git diff" and non-existent in "git diff --cached". This
           option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both
           options are experimental and could be removed in future.

       For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also
       gitdiffcore(7).

GENERATING PATCH TEXT WITH -P         top

       Running git-diff(1), git-log(1), git-show(1), git-diff-index(1),
       git-diff-tree(1), or git-diff-files(1) with the -p option
       produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text
       via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment
       variables (see git(1)), and the diff attribute (see
       gitattributes(5)).

       What the -p option produces is slightly different from the
       traditional diff format:

        1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

               diff --git a/file1 b/file2

           The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is
           involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion,
           /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

           When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name
           of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the
           file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

        2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

               old mode <mode>
               new mode <mode>
               deleted file mode <mode>
               new file mode <mode>
               copy from <path>
               copy to <path>
               rename from <path>
               rename to <path>
               similarity index <number>
               dissimilarity index <number>
               index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

           File modes are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the
           file type and file permission bits.

           Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/
           prefixes.

           The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines,
           and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed
           lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent
           sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for
           two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line
           from the old file made it into the new one.

           The index line includes the blob object names before and
           after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode
           does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old
           and the new mode.

        3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained
           for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see
           git-config(1)).

        4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the
           commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the
           commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file
           sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

               diff --git a/a b/b
               rename from a
               rename to b
               diff --git a/b b/a
               rename from b
               rename to a

        5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the
           hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in
           gitattributes(5) for details of how to tailor this to
           specific languages.

COMBINED DIFF FORMAT         top

       Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to
       produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default
       format when showing merges with git-diff(1) or git-show(1). Note
       also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of
       these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

       A "combined diff" format looks like this:

           diff --combined describe.c
           index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
           --- a/describe.c
           +++ b/describe.c
           @@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
                   return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
             }

           - static void describe(char *arg)
            -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
           ++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
             {
            +      unsigned char sha1[20];
            +      struct commit *cmit;
                   struct commit_list *list;
                   static int initialized = 0;
                   struct commit_name *n;

            +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
            +              usage(describe_usage);
            +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
            +      if (!cmit)
            +              usage(describe_usage);
            +
                   if (!initialized) {
                           initialized = 1;
                           for_each_ref(get_name);

        1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this
           (when the -c option is used):

               diff --combined file

           or like this (when the --cc option is used):

               diff --cc file

        2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this
           example shows a merge with two parents):

               index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
               mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
               new file mode <mode>
               deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

           The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least
           one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended
           headers with information about detected content movement
           (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the
           diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff
           format.

        3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

               --- a/file
               +++ b/file

           Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified
           diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted
           files.

           However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided,
           instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line
           from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in
           the merge commit:

               --- a/file
               --- a/file
               --- a/file
               +++ b/file

           This extended format can be useful if rename or copy
           detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of
           the file in different parents.

        4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from
           accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format
           was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not
           meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in
           the extended index header:

               @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

           There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk
           header for combined diff format.

       Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files
       A and B with a single column that has - (minus — appears in A but
       removed in B), + (plus — missing in A but added to B), or " "
       (space — unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more
       files file1, file2,... with one file X, and shows how X differs
       from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to
       the output line to note how X’s line is different from it.

       A - character in the column N means that the line appears in
       fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the
       column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN
       does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from
       the point of view of that parent).

       In the above example output, the function signature was changed
       from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2,
       plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either
       file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1
       but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

       When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a
       merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the
       parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two
       unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1
       is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their
       version").

EXAMPLES         top

       git log --no-merges
           Show the whole commit history, but skip any merges

       git log v2.6.12.. include/scsi drivers/scsi
           Show all commits since version v2.6.12 that changed any file
           in the include/scsi or drivers/scsi subdirectories

       git log --since="2 weeks ago" -- gitk
           Show the changes during the last two weeks to the file gitk.
           The -- is necessary to avoid confusion with the branch named
           gitk

       git log --name-status release..test
           Show the commits that are in the "test" branch but not yet in
           the "release" branch, along with the list of paths each
           commit modifies.

       git log --follow builtin/rev-list.c
           Shows the commits that changed builtin/rev-list.c, including
           those commits that occurred before the file was given its
           present name.

       git log --branches --not --remotes=origin
           Shows all commits that are in any of local branches but not
           in any of remote-tracking branches for origin (what you have
           that origin doesn’t).

       git log master --not --remotes=*/master
           Shows all commits that are in local master but not in any
           remote repository master branches.

       git log -p -m --first-parent
           Shows the history including change diffs, but only from the
           “main branch” perspective, skipping commits that come from
           merged branches, and showing full diffs of changes introduced
           by the merges. This makes sense only when following a strict
           policy of merging all topic branches when staying on a single
           integration branch.

       git log -L '/int main/',/^}/:main.c
           Shows how the function main() in the file main.c evolved over
           time.

       git log -3
           Limits the number of commits to show to 3.

DISCUSSION         top

       Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

       •   The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences
           of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.

       •   Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This
           applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well
           as path names in command line arguments, environment
           variables and config files (.git/config (see git-config(1)),
           gitignore(5), gitattributes(5) and gitmodules(5)).

           Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as
           sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding
           conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using
           non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and
           file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings.
           However, repositories created on such systems will not work
           properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows)
           and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply
           assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other
           encodings correctly.

       •   Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other
           extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes
           ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC
           and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x,
           CP9xx etc.).

       Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in
       UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force
       UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project
       find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not
       forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

        1. git commit and git commit-tree issue a warning if the commit
           log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8
           string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy
           encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding
           in .git/config file, like this:

               [i18n]
                       commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

           Commit objects created with the above setting record the
           value of i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This
           is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this
           header implies that the commit log message is encoded in
           UTF-8.

        2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding
           header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message
           into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the
           desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in
           .git/config file, like this:

               [i18n]
                       logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

           If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
           i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

       Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
       message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object
       level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible
       operation.

CONFIGURATION         top

       See git-config(1) for core variables and git-diff(1) for settings
       related to diff generation.

       format.pretty
           Default for the --format option. (See Pretty Formats above.)
           Defaults to medium.

       i18n.logOutputEncoding
           Encoding to use when displaying logs. (See Discussion above.)
           Defaults to the value of i18n.commitEncoding if set, and
           UTF-8 otherwise.

       Everything above this line in this section isn’t included from
       the git-config(1) documentation. The content that follows is the
       same as what’s found there:

       log.abbrevCommit
           If true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and
           git-whatchanged(1) assume --abbrev-commit. You may override
           this option with --no-abbrev-commit.

       log.date
           Set the default date-time mode for the log command. Setting a
           value for log.date is similar to using git log's --date
           option. See git-log(1) for details.

           If the format is set to "auto:foo" and the pager is in use,
           format "foo" will be used for the date format. Otherwise,
           "default" will be used.

       log.decorate
           Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown by the
           log command. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes
           refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be
           printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including
           prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the
           output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if
           short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. This is
           the same as the --decorate option of the git log.

       log.initialDecorationSet
           By default, git log only shows decorations for certain known
           ref namespaces. If all is specified, then show all refs as
           decorations.

       log.excludeDecoration
           Exclude the specified patterns from the log decorations. This
           is similar to the --decorate-refs-exclude command-line
           option, but the config option can be overridden by the
           --decorate-refs option.

       log.diffMerges
           Set diff format to be used when --diff-merges=on is
           specified, see --diff-merges in git-log(1) for details.
           Defaults to separate.

       log.follow
           If true, git log will act as if the --follow option was used
           when a single <path> is given. This has the same limitations
           as --follow, i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files
           and does not work well on non-linear history.

       log.graphColors
           A list of colors, separated by commas, that can be used to
           draw history lines in git log --graph.

       log.showRoot
           If true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation
           event. This is equivalent to a diff against an empty tree.
           Tools like git-log(1) or git-whatchanged(1), which normally
           hide the root commit will now show it. True by default.

       log.showSignature
           If true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and
           git-whatchanged(1) assume --show-signature.

       log.mailmap
           If true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and
           git-whatchanged(1) assume --use-mailmap, otherwise assume
           --no-use-mailmap. True by default.

       notes.mergeStrategy
           Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving
           notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union,
           or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See the "NOTES MERGE
           STRATEGIES" section of git-notes(1) for more information on
           each strategy.

           This setting can be overridden by passing the --strategy
           option to git-notes(1).

       notes.<name>.mergeStrategy
           Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into
           refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general
           "notes.mergeStrategy". See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES"
           section in git-notes(1) for more information on the available
           strategies.

       notes.displayRef
           Which ref (or refs, if a glob or specified more than once),
           in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or
           GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit
           messages with the git log family of commands.

           This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF
           environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of
           refs or globs.

           A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a
           glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

           This setting can be disabled by the --no-notes option to the
           git log family of commands, or by the --notes=<ref> option
           accepted by those commands.

           The effective value of "core.notesRef" (possibly overridden
           by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of
           refs to be displayed.

       notes.rewrite.<command>
           When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or
           rebase), if this variable is false, git will not copy notes
           from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true.
           See also "notes.rewriteRef" below.

           This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF
           environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of
           refs or globs.

       notes.rewriteMode
           When copying notes during a rewrite (see the
           "notes.rewrite.<command>" option), determines what to do if
           the target commit already has a note. Must be one of
           overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to
           concatenate.

           This setting can be overridden with the
           GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

       notes.rewriteRef
           When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully
           qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. May be a glob,
           in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You
           may also specify this configuration several times.

           Does not have a default value; you must configure this
           variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to
           refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit
           notes.

           Can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment
           variable. See notes.rewrite.<command> above for a further
           description of its format.

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
       system) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2024-06-14.  (At that time,
       the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2024-06-12.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

Git 2.45.2.492.gd63586         2024-06-12                     GIT-LOG(1)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1)git-annotate(1)git-blame(1)git-bundle(1)git-config(1)git-diff(1)git-diff-files(1)git-diff-index(1)git-diff-tree(1)git-fetch(1)git-for-each-ref(1)git-format-patch(1)gitk(1)git-log(1)git-range-diff(1)git-rebase(1)git-receive-pack(1)git-reflog(1)git-revert(1)git-rev-list(1)git-shortlog(1)git-show(1)git-stash(1)git-whatchanged(1)gitattributes(5)gitweb.conf(5)gitdiffcore(7)giteveryday(7)gitrevisions(7)