Re: git log FILE vs git log --follow FILE missing commits

From: Kevin Daudt <me@ikke.info>
Date: Feb 2, 2020, 21:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20200202214243.GA1090206@alpha>
In-Reply-To: <CAFOYHZAx-MM26AuJmscK=kGgukQ62vkyqAqU49U-5WRaTp4mGQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 10:27:52AM +1300, Chris Packham wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> I've just hit a problem where git log doesn't want to tell me about a
> commit that touches a specific file.
> 
> I wanted to point someone at a particular change that I knew was made
> to a file so I fired up 'git log FILE' and to my surprise it wasn't
> listed. I wondered if I had remembered wrong so went grepping to
> confirm the change was in the file I thought it was, sure enough it
> was there.
> 
> Poking around a bit I found that git log --follow FILE shows the
> intended commit but git log FILE doesn't (it does show other commits
> that touch the file, most of which have tags if that's significant).
> The file hasn't been renamed so I didn't really expect --follow to
> change any behavior.
> 
> The version of git I'm using is 2.25.0 from
> http://ppa.launchpad.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu bionic main. I also tried
> 2.24.1 and 2.23.1 with the same problem.
> 
> Any suggestions for tracking this down?
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris

Hey Chris,

Try `git log --full-history FILE`. When passing a path to `git log` will enable history simplification, which might explain why certain commits are not shown.

Kind regards, Kevin.