How to count number of commits per file pathname by author in a Git repository?

Question

While git-blame and counting number of lines changed by an author within a git repository are helpful, is there a command that can list all of the pathnames modified in a repo a

Answer 1

Just realized that if you use --name-only to print the filenames, pretty format as empty string, and use this method to sort, uniq, and sort by top number of commits, in *nix/OS X, you could use:

git log --name-only --author=John --pretty=format: | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Be sure that you are using the right author.

E.g. if we were trying to find DHH's authors in Rails, we might do:

git log --format='%aN <%aE>' | LC_ALL='C' sort -u | grep avid

and notice that all of DHH's authors in the Rails git repo use the name "David Heinemeier Hansson". So, then we could do:

git log --name-only --author="David Heinemeier Hansson" --pretty=format: | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Which might output:

3624 
 611 actionpack/CHANGELOG
 432 activerecord/CHANGELOG
 329 railties/CHANGELOG
 206 activerecord/lib/active_record/base.rb
 195 activesupport/CHANGELOG
 157 actionpack/lib/action_controller/base.rb
 153 railties/Rakefile
 108 activerecord/lib/active_record/associations.rb
  79 actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/javascript_helper.rb
  75 activerecord/lib/active_record/validations.rb
  74 activerecord/test/base_test.rb
  69 actionmailer/CHANGELOG
  66 railties/lib/rails_generator/generators/applications/app/app_generator.rb
  66 activerecord/Rakefile
  66 actionpack/lib/action_controller/caching.rb
  60 actionpack/lib/action_controller/routing.rb
  59 railties/lib/initializer.rb
  59 actionpack/Rakefile
  57 actionpack/lib/action_controller/request.rb
  ...

So, as of 2015-02-21, there were 3624 files in the Rails git repo that it appears he never personally made commits to, the top number of commits for a file was the ActionPack CHANGELOG at 611 commits, followed by the ActiveRecord CHANGELOG, and ActiveRecord::Base was the Ruby file he made the most commits to.

If you want to exclude the number of files not touched from the counts, use --format= instead of --pretty=format:, e.g.:

git log --name-only --author="David Heinemeier Hansson" --format: | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr