git-rev-list(1)

Commits modifying the given <paths> are selected.

Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

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)

Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history.

Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a meaningful history.

All commits in the simplified history are shown.

Additional option to --full-history to remove some needless merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected commits contributing to this merge.

When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), only display commits that exist directly on the ancestry chain between the commit1 and commit2, i.e. commits that are both descendants of commit1, and ancestors of commit2.

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.

          .-A---N---O
         /     /   /
        I---------D

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

Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME (though this can be changed, see --sparse below).

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /
        I     B   /   D   /
         \   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'

Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent.

All commits that are walked are included.

First, build a history graph in the same way that --full-history with parent rewriting does (see above).

          .-A---M---N---O
         /     /       /
        I     B       D
         \   /       /
          `---------'

Limit the displayed commits to those directly on the ancestry chain between the “from” and “to” commits in the given commit range. I.e. only display commits that are ancestor of the “to” commit and descendants of the “from” commit.

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

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

Limit output to the one commit object which is roughly halfway between included and excluded commits. Note that the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad is added to the included commits (if it exists) and the good bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* are added to the excluded commits (if they exist). Thus, supposing there are no refs in refs/bisect/, if

        $ git rev-list --bisect foo ^bar ^baz

        $ git rev-list foo ^midpoint
        $ git rev-list midpoint ^bar ^baz

This calculates the same as --bisect, except that refs in refs/bisect/ are not used, and except that this outputs text ready to be eval’ed by the shell. These lines will assign the name of the midpoint revision to the variable bisect_rev, and the expected number of commits to be tested after bisect_rev is tested to bisect_nr, the expected number of commits to be tested if bisect_rev turns out to be good to bisect_good, the expected number of commits to be tested if bisect_rev turns out to be bad to bisect_bad, and the number of commits we are bisecting right now to bisect_all.

This outputs all the commit objects between the included and excluded commits, ordered by their distance to the included and excluded commits. Refs in refs/bisect/ are not used. The farthest from them is displayed first. (This is the only one displayed by --bisect.)

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the commit timestamp order.

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the author timestamp order.

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, and avoid showing commits on multiple lines of history intermixed.

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

Output the commits in reverse order. Cannot be combined with --walk-reflogs.

Print the object IDs of any object referenced by the listed commits. --objects foo ^bar thus means “send me all object IDs which I need to download if I have the commit object bar but not foo”.

Similar to --objects, but also print the IDs of excluded commits prefixed with a “-” character. This is used by git-pack-objects(1) to build a “thin” pack, which records objects in deltified form based on objects contained in these excluded commits to reduce network traffic.

Similar to --objects-edge, but it tries harder to find excluded commits at the cost of increased time. This is used instead of --objects-edge to build “thin” packs for shallow repositories.

Pretend as if all trees and blobs used by the index are listed on the command line. Note that you probably want to use --objects, too.

Only useful with --objects; print the object IDs that are not in packs.

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.

Overrides a previous --no-walk.

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, 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.

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show only a partial prefix. Non default number of digits can be specified with "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed).

Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates --abbrev-commit and those options which imply it such as "--oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.

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

The commit objects record the encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. 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.

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to fill to the next display column that is 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.

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

Synonym for --date=relative.

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.

Print the contents of the commit in raw-format; each record is separated with a NUL character.

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

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

Print the raw commit timestamp.

Mark which side of a symmetric diff 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 -.

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

        $ 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

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.

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.

Print a number stating how many commits would have been listed, and suppress all other output. When used together with --left-right, instead print the counts for left and right commits, separated by a tab. When used together with --cherry-mark, omit patch equivalent commits from these counts and print the count for equivalent commits separated by a tab.