show-only-commits-that-touch-specific-lines.md

Show Only Commits That Touch Specific Lines

When you run git log, you are listing all commits in reverse-chronological order for the current branch. There are ways of filtering the commits that get output from git-log. As of Git 1.8.4, git-log output can be filtered by commits that touch a range of line numbers.

This is done with the -L flag.

For instance, if I want to see all commits that touched the 13th line of my README.md file, then I can do this:

$ git log -L13,13:README.md

I can alter the command to show commits that touched a range of lines like so:

$ git log -L19,45:README.md

I used the -L flag recently to find when a dependency was added to my package.json file even though the most recent changes to that line were version bumps.

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