SYNOPSIS

git show [options] <object>…

DESCRIPTION

Shows one or more objects (blobs, trees, tags and commits).

For commits it shows the log message and textual diff. It also presents the merge commit in a special format as produced by git diff-tree --cc.

For tags, it shows the tag message and the referenced objects.

For trees, it shows the names (equivalent to git ls-tree with --name-only).

For plain blobs, it shows the plain contents.

The command takes options applicable to the git diff-tree command to control how the changes the commit introduces are shown.

This manual page describes only the most frequently used options.

OPTIONS

<object>…

The names of objects to show. For a more complete list of ways to spell object names, see "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in gitrevisions(7).

--pretty[=<format>]
--format=<format>

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, email, raw and format:<string>. See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When omitted, the format defaults to medium.

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

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show only a partial prefix. Non default number of digits can be specified with "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed).

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

--oneline

This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit" used together.

--encoding[=<encoding>]

The commit objects record the encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8.

--no-notes
--show-notes[=<ref>]

Show the notes (see git-notes(1)) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no --pretty, --format nor --oneline option is given on the command line.

With an optional argument, add this ref to the list of notes. The ref is taken to be in refs/notes/ if it is not qualified.

--[no-]standard-notes

Enable or disable populating the notes ref list from the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). Enabled by default. See git-config(1).

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the sha1s of ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for example, if you are only interested in changes related to a certain directory or file.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see git-config(1)). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

Note
Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d placeholder will use the "short" decoration format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, line-feeds that immediately precede the expansion are deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

EXAMPLES

git show v1.0.0

Shows the tag v1.0.0, along with the object the tags points at.

git show v1.0.0^{tree}

Shows the tree pointed to by the tag v1.0.0.

git show -s --format=%s v1.0.0^{commit}

Shows the subject of the commit pointed to by the tag v1.0.0.

git show next~10:Documentation/README

Shows the contents of the file Documentation/README as they were current in the 10th last commit of the branch next.

git show master:Makefile master:t/Makefile

Concatenates the contents of said Makefiles in the head of the branch master.

Discussion

At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic.

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  1. git commit and git commit-tree issues a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitencoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            commitencoding = ISO-8859-1

    Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitencoding in its encoding header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

  2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logoutputencoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1

    If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitencoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

Author

Written by Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> and Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>. Significantly enhanced by Johannes Schindelin <[email protected]>.

Documentation

Documentation by David Greaves, Petr Baudis and the git-list <[email protected]>.

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite