I attempted to rewrite the log message in a bit more objective voice like this: builtin/show: do not prune by pathspec "git show $commit -- $path" does not show anything for a commit that does not change the $path. While this may be technically correct, it is somewhat unexpected from the end user's point of view. Unless "show" is used as "log -p", e.g. "git show HEAD~5..", it makes more sense to show at least the log message for commits, even they are uninteresting with respect to $path. Turn off commit pruning (but keep diff limiting of course) so that the command shows the log message and the diff that the commit introduces to the path. The diff part may be empty for a given commit that does not touch the path. As an intended side effect, users mistaking "git show commit -- path" for "git show commit:path" are automatically reminded that they asked git to show a commit, not a blob. Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> which made me realize that this change does regress for no-walk case. What if you (or your homegrown tool or alias) are feeding a list of candidate commits that may have touched the path, without walking, and are expecting them to be filtered? $ git show A B C D -- path We used to get a nice output of "git show C -- path" in such a case but now the output will be cluttered with the log message from a commit that is totally uninteresting with respect to the given path. I really wanted to like this patch, because I _very much_ liked the "intended" ;-) side effect. I am torn. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html