One of the most powerful commands in Git is log. You've already seen the log being used a bit in previous chapters, but now it is time to look at it in detail.
The log can show you when each commit was created, who created it, and other useful information about the commit, such as what changed in each file. You have great control over what is displayed, as you will see in this chapter.
Let's quickly build another project and repository:
Figure 9.1: Create a new repository
Next, as we have done before, we'll clone this repository to our local machine:
Figure 9.2: Cloning the demo program
With this local repository, we can begin to examine its commits using log. To do so, of course, we need to create a program and make some commits.
Create a program in the LogDemo directory. Change the program to be public and build and run it to make sure it is working:
Figure 9.3: Testing the program
I'm going to create the same calculator class we've seen before, with the same commits after each tiny function. I'll spare you having to look at all that and I'll just put it into the repository.
Having added all the functions, let's give it a spin:
using System;
namespace LogDemo
{
public class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args...There are a large number of flags you can add to log to control its output. In creating the lg alias, we already saw how to use log -–oneline:
Figure 9.9: Using log at the command line
Looking closely, we see that the left column has the short ID, the right column lists the messages associated with each commit, and for both the first and last commits, we also see where the head pointer is; both locally and on origin.
If you want to know which files were changed in each commit but not see what those changes were, you would use:
git log ––name-only
Here is an excerpt:
Figure 9.10: Using log to see file changes
We see two commits. The first, in Program.cs, has the message Call the add function, and you can also see the full ID, the author, and when this commit was made.
You can of course do the same thing with our lg alias to condense the output:
Figure 9.11: Using...
In this section you've seen the powerful Git command log in use. Among the flags we covered were:
|
log flag |
Meaning |
|
|
Show only one line per commit |
|
|
Names of files that have changed in each commit |
|
|
What has changed? |
|
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What has changed in this file? |
|
|
Search for |
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... |
