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git logThere are many options for limiting the number of commits you can get from your repository's history. We demonstrated git loghow rangeto use the double-dot syntax, the caret ^operator, --notoptions, and several shortcuts to help us view only git committhe history of a branch.

Git draws its power from this rich revision query system, enabling users to manage their branches and design efficient workflows with them.

git logGit commit history for branches using and advanced restriction options

Git repositories can grow large with long commit histories. In such cases, viewing the full history is not very helpful.

git logThe command provides us with many useful options to extract the subset of commits we need from the repository history.

git log [formatting options] [limiting options]

[formatting options]Lets us display different information about our commits, while [limiting options]helps us select the commit we want to see.

When we limiting optionsprovide correct range values ​​in these , we can git showcommit on the current branch.

<branch1>..<branch2>Git commit history for branches using double-dot syntax

The double-dot syntax shows those commits that we can reach from branch2but not from branch1.

Suppose we mastercreate a new one from experiment_branch. We then commit to both branches, but don't merge them yet.

If we now experiment_branchdo a simple on git log, it will show the full history, including the commits we made experiment_branchon before creating .master

This is not very helpful behavior. A common use case is when we only want to see experiment_branchthe unmerged commits on .

We do this using the following command.

git log master..experiment_branch

All commits reachable from experiment_branch, but not masterreachable from (essentially, all unmerged commits on the experimental branch).

We can also flip the order of the branches to see the state of the we are about to merge experiment_branchour master.

Our masterlooks like this:

When we do this:

git log experiment_branch..master

After creating our experiment branch, we only see masternew commits on .

Use git logthe helpful shortcut of to save a few characters from typing to display the Git commit history for a branch

If we don't provide either of the two branches in the double-dot syntax, Git will default them to HEAD.

We can git checkoutuse this with a sensible choice of to shorten our git logcommands.

First, we switch to our experimental branch.

git checkout experiment_branch

Now HEADpoint to experiment_branch.

We now use a shorter version of the two-dot range syntax, omitting the right branch operand.

git log master..

Git defaults the correct branch to current HEAD, ours experiment_branch, and we get the same history of unmerged commits as above.

Use logto show commits on the current branch, useful option to only see the last few commits

Our experiment_branchmay have a long history, with many unmerged commits.

In this case, we probably only want to see the last few commits.

git log -2 master..

-2option to show only the last 2 commits in the history subset we selected.

^Git commit history for a branch with the caret operator

The caret operator ^excludes all commits that are reachable from the branch it operates on. We can use this to only show the history of the current branch.

git log ^master experiment_branch

--notGit commit history for a branch with the -b option

We can also use the -p option before the branch name --notto achieve the same result. This will not include all commits reachable from that branch.

git log experiment_branch --not master

We see that it does the same thing, only experiment_branchshowing the unmerged commits on our .