On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Christian MICHON wrote: > > in order to code a gvim plugin for git (I started something), I now miss > 2 one-liners, and I hope experts around this list will find it easy > to answer (for the sake of this plugin) > > ================================================ > 1) how do I check the status of a single file ? ( the file is already > added in the index) It really depends on what you want to do. If you want to know *what* the index contains right there and then, do for example: git ls-files --stage -- "$filename" and it will tell you the index contents (it might be several lines: if the "filename" entry is a directory it will list *all* files under that directory, but even if it's a single file it could give you all the unmerged stages for that file). On the other hand, often you want to know what the status of a file is not in "absolute" terms, but relative to the index or to the last commit. If so, you can use something like git diff-files --name-status -- "$filename" which just compares the index with the current working tree. And if you want to check against the last commit (ie HEAD), use git diff-index --name-status HEAD -- "$filename" which can also be used with "--cached" to see the difference between the HEAD and the index. That's how "git status" used to do it when it was a shell script (now it's done with a built-in). In fact, you could look at the old git-commit.sh script before it was turned into a built-in with git show v1.4.0:git-commit.sh and look at the "run_status" shell function. > I usually use git-status here, but for single files that need update, > there should be a faster way. Indeed. HOWEVER! Note that when you ask for the status of a single file, that obviously means that there is no "rename detection" going on, so if you want to see the "renamed from Xyz", you need to do the global analysis that "git-status" does, and then fetch the filename info from there. (Alternatively, you can choose to always do the single-file case first, and then only *if* it's a newly added file you could ask "was it renamed from anything else"). > 2) how do I find in historical reverse order all the commits a > certain file belongs to since the origin ? That's quite an expensive operation: git rev-list --reverse HEAD -- "$filename" Or did you by "historical" mean "newest first"? If so, just do git rev-list HEAD -- "$filename" (that's the order that git considers "natural"). > I usually do: git-log <file> | grep ^commit > I would like to avoid piping here... Well, "git log" is really just rev-list with fancy options to make it show more than just the commit name. Of course, you *could* do git log --pretty=oneline -- "$filename" which gets you pretty close. But if you literally just want the commit SHA1, "git rev-list" is what you're really asking for. Linus - 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