Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)

Overview of this book

Git is one of the most popular types of Source Code Management (SCM) and Distributed Version Control System (DVCS). Despite the powerful and versatile nature of the tool enveloping strong support for nonlinear development and the ability to handle large projects efficiently, it is a complex tool and often regarded as “user-unfriendly”. Getting to know the ideas and concepts behind the architecture of Git will help you make full use of its power and understand its behavior. Learning the best practices and recommended workflows should help you to avoid problems and ensure trouble-free development. The book scope is meticulously designed to help you gain deeper insights into Git's architecture, its underlying concepts, behavior, and best practices. Mastering Git starts with a quick implementation example of using Git for a collaborative development of a sample project to establish the foundation knowledge of Git operational tasks and concepts. Furthermore, as you progress through the book, the tutorials provide detailed descriptions of various areas of usage: from archaeology, through managing your own work, to working with other developers. This book also helps augment your understanding to examine and explore project history, create and manage your contributions, set up repositories and branches for collaboration in centralized and distributed version control, integrate work from other developers, customize and extend Git, and recover from repository errors. By exploring advanced Git practices, you will attain a deeper understanding of Git’s behavior, allowing you to customize and extend existing recipes and write your own.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Git
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Searching history


A huge number and variety of useful options to the git log command are limiting options—that is, options that let you show only a subset of commits. This complements selecting commits to view by passing the appropriate revision range, and allows us to search the history for the specific versions, utilizing information other than the shape of the DAG of revisions.

Limiting the number of revisions

The most basic way of limiting the git log output, the simplest limiting option, is to show only then most recent commits. This is done using the -<n> option (where n is any integer); this can be also written as -n <n>, or in long form as --max-count=<n>. For example, git log -2 would show the two last (most recent) commits in the current line of development, starting from the implicit HEAD revision.

You can skip the first few commits shown with --skip=<n>.

Matching revision metadata

History limiting options can be divided into those that check information stored...