log first 10 in git

Question

Two questions:

1. How to show the first 10 commit in git from beginning to end. (no branch)
2. How the specify the commit index and log it. (show the second or

Answer 1

To get the last 10 commits:

git log HEAD~10..HEAD

To get them in oldest-to-newest order:

git log --reverse HEAD~10..HEAD

Note that if there are merges, this may show more than 10 commits; add --first-parent if you only want to traverse through the first parent of each branch.

For far more detail, see the documentation for git rev-list.

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Edit: You've already gotten a useful answer above to "show commits near the start of history" (again, see the caveats about multiple non-connected commit DAGs in a repo). But you can also do, e.g.:

git log --no-walk `git rev-list HEAD | tail -n 10`

and:

git log --no-walk `git rev-list --reverse HEAD | head -n 10`

depending on which order you want the results.