How to filter Git logs

Getting all commits

git log

Getting the last n commits

We can get the last n commits by running “git log -n”. Let’s say we want to get the last 2 commits.

git log -2

Getting commits since a specific date

We can filter commits based on the date they were made. Let’s say we want to get all the commits made 01/17/2022.

git log --since 2022-01-17

Getting commits before a specific date

Similarly, we can get commits that were made before a specific date.

git log --until 2022-01-16

Getting commits by author

We can also get commits made by a specific author. For instance:

git log --author=pipinho13

Getting commits between two SHAs

We can get logs between two SHAs like this:

git log <XXX>...<YYY>

where XXX and YYY are the respective SHAs. Note that we can replace with HEAD if we need to get the commits from up to now, i.e.:

git log <XXX>...HEAD

Getting commits related to a file

We can filter logs by files. Suppose we want to get all the logs associated with the “README.md” file.

git log README.md

Getting commits using an expression

We can use the powerful “grep” command to filter commits. We usually look for some expression in the commit message. For example, let’s get the commits that contain the word “wrong” in the message:

git log --grep="wrong"

---