How to refer to a specific line or range of lines in github?

Question

If you want to add a reference to a specific line or a range of lines, it would be nice to get an URL that does that.

Answer 1

If you go the the file (or version of the file you want to refer to), click the line number (or hold shift down to select a range).

=> you will see that the URL changes (it adds something like #L21-L23 to the URL).

Just copy the URL.

Answer 2

Note that the problem with the #Lxx-Lyy is that (from this post):

source files are subject to change, or even be removed, so there’s no guarantee that your link will always point to the correct place.
By default, GitHub project pages link to the most current version of the source. A better practice is to link to a specific commit, where the content of source files are not subject to versioning.

To view a GitHub project at a certain commit, click on the tree link in the commit header, or just press t on your keyboard. You can then browse the project files, and link to sources of this commit, i.e.

http://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/27291ff06ddb655f90a8d1eada71f7ac61499b12/src/css.js#L171-L185.

Note that the only difference in the URL is changing the branch name master with the commit SHA.

+1 tip from Paul Irish:

plus you only need 4 characters of the SHA in the URL... it figures it out.
I usually truncate to 7ish characters.

Nice: http://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/27291ff/src/css.js#L171-185

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If you have a GitHub page which does not reference a sha1, type y:
that will reload that same page with the current SHA1.