Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn’t compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

--no-min-parents and --no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit) again. Equivalent forms are --min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, “3rd on b” may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.

For example, --cherry-pick --right-only A...B omits those commits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More precisely, --cherry-pick --right-only --no-merges gives the exact list.

With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shown as ref@{Nth} (where Nth is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as ref@{timestamp} (with the timestamp for that entry), depending on a few rules:

Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also git-reflog(1).

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q


         /     /   /   /   /   /


        I     B   C   D   E   Y


         \   /   /   /   /   /


          `-------------'   X

This results in:

          .-A---N---O


         /     /   /


        I---------D

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.

        I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear.

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.

Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q


         /     /   /   /   /


        I     B   /   D   /


         \   /   /   /   /


          `-------------'

Compare to --full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N, and X, Y and Q.

Note that without --full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules:

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to --full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

          .-A---M---N---O


         /     /       /


        I     B       D


         \   /       /


          `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over --full-history:

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

            D---E-------F


           /     \       \


          B---C---G---H---I---J


         /                     \


        A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that “what does M have that did not exist in D”. The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

                E-------F


                 \       \


                  G---H---I---J


                               \


                                L--M

We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but is just more explicit.

If we instead are interested in a given topic within this range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for example would result in:

                E


                 \


                  G---H---I---J


                               \


                                L--M

Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

                K---------------L--M

          .-A---M-----C--N---O---P


         /     / \  \  \/   /   /


        I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /


         \   /     \/         /


          \ /      /\        /


           `---X--'  `---Y--'

        I---X

          .-A---M--------N---O---P


         /     / \  \  \/   /   /


        I     B   \  R-'`--'   /


         \   /     \/         /


          \ /      /\        /


           `---X--'  `------'

          .-A---M--.


         /     /    \


        I     B      R


         \   /      /


          \ /      /


           `---X--'

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

        I---X---R---N

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

          .-A---M--.   N


         /     /    \ /


        I     B      R


         \   /      /


          \ /      /


           `---X--'

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

        $ git rev-list --bisect foo ^bar ^baz

outputs midpoint, the output of the two commands

        $ git rev-list foo ^midpoint


        $ git rev-list midpoint ^bar ^baz

would be of roughly the same length. Finding the change which introduces a regression is thus reduced to a binary search: repeatedly generate and test new 'midpoint’s until the commit chain is of length one.

This is useful because it makes it easy to choose a good commit to test when you want to avoid to test some of them for some reason (they may not compile for example).

This option can be used along with --bisect-vars, in this case, after all the sorted commit objects, there will be the same text as if --bisect-vars had been used alone.

For example, in a commit history like this:

    ---1----2----4----7


        \              \


         3----5----6----8---

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git rev-list and friends with --date-order show the commits in the timestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

With --topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together.

The form --filter=blob:none omits all blobs.

The form --filter=blob:limit=<n>[kmg] omits blobs larger than n bytes or units. n may be zero. The suffixes k, m, and g can be used to name units in KiB, MiB, or GiB. For example, blob:limit=1k is the same as blob:limit=1024.

The form --filter=object:type=(tag|commit|tree|blob) omits all objects which are not of the requested type.

The form --filter=sparse:oid=<blob-ish> uses a sparse-checkout specification contained in the blob (or blob-expression) <blob-ish> to omit blobs that would not be required for a sparse checkout on the requested refs.

The form --filter=tree:<depth> omits all blobs and trees whose depth from the root tree is >= <depth> (minimum depth if an object is located at multiple depths in the commits traversed). <depth>=0 will not include any trees or blobs unless included explicitly in the command-line (or standard input when --stdin is used). <depth>=1 will include only the tree and blobs which are referenced directly by a commit reachable from <commit> or an explicitly-given object. <depth>=2 is like <depth>=1 while also including trees and blobs one more level removed from an explicitly-given commit or tree.

Note that the form --filter=sparse:path=<path> that wants to read from an arbitrary path on the filesystem has been dropped for security reasons.

Multiple --filter= flags can be specified to combine filters. Only objects which are accepted by every filter are included.

The form --filter=combine:<filter1>+<filter2>+...<filterN> can also be used to combined several filters, but this is harder than just repeating the --filter flag and is usually not necessary. Filters are joined by + and individual filters are %-encoded (i.e. URL-encoded). Besides the + and % characters, the following characters are reserved and also must be encoded: ~!@#$^&*()[]{}\;",<>?'` as well as all characters with ASCII code <= 0x20, which includes space and newline.

Other arbitrary characters can also be encoded. For instance, combine:tree:3+blob:none and combine:tree%3A3+blob%3Anone are equivalent.

The form --missing=error requests that rev-list stop with an error if a missing object is encountered. This is the default action.

The form --missing=allow-any will allow object traversal to continue if a missing object is encountered. Missing objects will silently be omitted from the results.

The form --missing=allow-promisor is like allow-any, but will only allow object traversal to continue for EXPECTED promisor missing objects. Unexpected missing objects will raise an error.

The form --missing=print is like allow-any, but will also print a list of the missing objects. Object IDs are prefixed with a “?” character.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see git-config(1)).

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time, e.g. “2 hours ago”. The -local option has no effect for --date=relative.

--date=local is an alias for --date=default-local.

--date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO 8601-like format. The differences to the strict ISO 8601 format are:

--date=iso-strict (or --date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps in strict ISO 8601 format.

--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, often found in email messages.

--date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

--date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

--date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not match the current time-zone, and doesn’t print the whole date if that matches (ie skip printing year for dates that are "this year", but also skip the whole date itself if it’s in the last few days and we can just say what weekday it was). For older dates the hour and minute is also omitted.

--date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -local has no effect.

--date=format:... feeds the format ... to your system strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale’s preferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list of format placeholders. When using -local, the correct syntax is --date=format-local:....

--date=default is the default format, and is similar to --date=rfc2822, with a few exceptions:

For example, if you have this topology:

             y---b---b  branch B


            / \ /


           /   .


          /   / \


         o---x---a---a  branch A

you would get an output like this:

        $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B


        >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b


        >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b


        <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a


        <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a


        -yyyyyyy... 1st on b


        -xxxxxxx... 1st on a

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the --date-order option may also be specified.