Re: how to track the history of a line in a file

From: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
Date: Jan 6, 2009, 15:48 UTC
Message-ID: <87d4f01lmt.fsf@gollum.intra.norang.ca>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0901021405460.21567@asgard.lang.hm>

david@lang.hm writes:

Show 31 quoted lines

> I have a need to setup a repository where I'm storing config files,
> and I need to be able to search the history of a particular line, not
> just when the last edit of the line was (which is what I see from git
> blame)
>
> I'm not seeing a obvious way to do this, am I missing something or
> does it need a non-obvious approach?
>
> for example, if I do
>
> git blame -L /SUBLEVEL/,+1 -M Makefile
>
> on the linux kernel it currently shows
>
> 57f8f7b6 (Linus Torvalds 2008-10-23 20:06:52 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 28
>
> what I would want it to show would be a list of the commits that have
> changed this line.
>
> It looks like I can write a script to do this
>
> git blame -L /SUBLEVEL/,+1 -M Makefile 57f8f7b6^
> 6e86841d (Linus Torvalds 2008-07-28 19:40:31 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 27
> git blame -L /SUBLEVEL/,+1 -M Makefile 6e86841d^
> 2ddcca36 (Linus Torvalds 2008-05-03 11:59:44 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 26
>
> etc.
>
> is there a better way to do this?
>
> David Lang

I think you need a script to do what you want.  I think this works...

Save the following script in ~/bin/git-rblame.sh, make it executable, and then create a global git alias for it as follows:

$ git config --global alias.rblame '!~/bin/git-rblame.sh $*'

Then you can just use

$ git rblame -L /SUBLEVEL/,+1 -M Makefile 6e86841d (Linus Torvalds 2008-07-28 19:40:31 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 27 2ddcca36 (Linus Torvalds 2008-05-03 11:59:44 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 26 ... 4c91aedb (Linus Torvalds 2005-06-28 22:57:29 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 13 ^1da177e (Linus Torvalds 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -0700 3) SUBLEVEL = 12

------cut here ------ !/bin/git-rblame.sh ---
#!/bin/sh
PARAMS="$*"
LINE=$(git blame $PARAMS)
while test $? == 0
do
    echo $LINE
    COMMIT="${LINE:0:8}^"
    LINE=$(git blame $PARAMS $COMMIT 2>/dev/null)
done
------cut here ------------------------------

Cheers, Bernt