List all the versions of a given line number in the GIT history [duplicate]

Answer 1

There's actually a fancy GUI shipped with Git which makes it easy to travel back and forth in time to see how a particular line changed. Try

git gui blame <file>

You can click on the revision next to a link to "travel back in time".

Answer 2

This will call git blame for every meaningful revision to show line $LINE of file $FILE:

git log --format=format:%H $FILE | xargs -L 1 git blame $FILE -L $LINE,$LINE

As usual, the blame shows the revision number in the beginning of each line. You can append

| sort | uniq -c

to get aggregated results, something like a list of commits that changed this line. (Not quite, if code only has been moved around, this might show the same commit ID twice for different contents of the line. For a more detailed analysis you'd have to do a lagged comparison of the git blame results for adjacent commits. Anyone?)

Answer 3

git blame <file> -L <line>,<line>

Answer 4

use git blame to achieve

see if it works

NAME
       git-blame - Show what revision and author last modified each line of a file

SYNOPSIS
       git blame [-c] [-b] [-l] [--root] [-t] [-f] [-n] [-s] [-e] [-p] [-w] [--incremental] [-L n,m]
                   [-S <revs-file>] [-M] [-C] [-C] [-C] [--since=<date>] [--abbrev=<n>]
                   [<rev> | --contents <file> | --reverse <rev>] [--] <file>

DESCRIPTION
       Annotates each line in the given file with information from the revision which last modified the line. Optionally, start annotating from the given revision.

Answer 5

I think you're after git blame, it tells you the commit that added each line.

So run git blame the-file-that-has-that-line.txt and go to line 100, it'll tell you what commit added it (and when it was committed, and by whom).

Answer 6

Check out this short tutorial as well: http://zsoltfabok.com/blog/2012/02/git-blame-line-history/
Basically, it guides you through a combination of git blame and git show to see which commits change a specific line (git blame, as already suggested especially in David Parsson's answer) and how that line change (git show <commit-id>). So, iterating on commits alternating git blame <commit-id> git show <commit-id> will give you the full history of a specific line of a file.
Also, don't forget git blame -M in case you doubt the line has been copied from another file. From https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-blame.html

-M |num|
Detect moved or copied lines within a file. When a commit moves or copies a block of lines (e.g. the original file has A and then B, and the commit changes it to B and then A), the traditional blame algorithm notices only half of the movement and typically blames the lines that were moved up (i.e. B) to the parent and assigns blame to the lines that were moved down (i.e. A) to the child commit. With this option, both groups of lines are blamed on the parent by running extra passes of inspection.

num is optional but it is the lower bound on the number of alphanumeric characters that git must detect as moving/copying within a file for it to associate those lines with the parent commit. The default value is 20.