Distil git logs attached to a single file

I run git log --oneline to list out the commit logs all the time. It prints out a compact view of the git history. Running the command in this repo gives me this:

d9fad76 Publish blog on safer operator.itemgetter, closes #130
0570997 Merge pull request #129 from rednafi/dependabot/...
6967f73 Bump actions/setup-python from 3 to 4
48c8634 Merge pull request #128 from rednafi/dependabot/pip/mypy-0.961
5b7a7b0 Bump mypy from 0.960 to 0.961

However, there are times when I need to list out the commit logs that only represent the changes made to a particular file. Here’s the command that does exactly that.

git logs --oneline --follow <file_path>

Running the command on the markdown file that you’re currently reading prints out the following:

git log --oneline \
    --follow content/shell/distil_git_logs_attached_to_a_file.md

7a21b3d (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Nit, refs #132
6c08934 Publish distil git logs blog, refs #132
f5d2d4a Git log follow post, closes #132

Unfortunately, this command doesn’t support flag chaining. So, you can’t use the --follow flag multiple times to concatenate the logs for multiple files. But there’s a way to do it via shell command. Here’s how:

echo "<file_path_1> <file_path_2>" \
    | xargs -n1 \
    | xargs -I{} sh -c "git log --oneline --follow {}; echo ===="

Running the command on two random files in this repo yields the following output:

echo "pelicanconf.py src.py" \
    | xargs -n1 \
    | xargs -I{} sh -c "git log --oneline --follow {}; echo ===="

96c0e8c Aesthetics, refs #131
e6d5409 Add default link-sharing image, closes #83
9ed958c SEO
fba05d8 Add footer
8dec778 Transformation
4a402b3 Basic customizations
1c93c23 Add pelican conf
====
b89791f Fix bug in operator itemgetter implementation
c75e2ab Push draft of post on typeguard, refs #87
0c6fc7b Add blacken docs to tool stack
20ac41d Publish amphibian decorators blog, closes #54
====

Here, the first xargs is used to split the line and extract the two filenames. The second xargs applies the git log --oneline --follow command to the two files and concatenates the output with a ==== separator. The separator helps you figure out which output came from which file.

Recent posts