GIT-BLAME(1)			  Git Manual			  GIT-BLAME(1)



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 <range>] [-S <revs-file>] [-M] [-C] [-C] [-C] [--since=<date>]
		   [--ignore-rev <rev>] [--ignore-revs-file <file>]
		   [--color-lines] [--color-by-age] [--progress] [--abbrev=<n>]
		   [<rev> | --contents <file> | --reverse <rev>..<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.

       When specified one or more times, -L restricts annotation to the
       requested lines.

       The origin of lines is automatically followed across whole-file renames
       (currently there is no option to turn the rename-following off). To
       follow lines moved from one file to another, or to follow lines that
       were copied and pasted from another file, etc., see the -C and -M
       options.

       The report does not tell you anything about lines which have been
       deleted or replaced; you need to use a tool such as git diff or the
       "pickaxe" interface briefly mentioned in the following paragraph.

       Apart from supporting file annotation, Git also supports searching the
       development history for when a code snippet occurred in a change. This
       makes it possible to track when a code snippet was added to a file,
       moved or copied between files, and eventually deleted or replaced. It
       works by searching for a text string in the diff. A small example of
       the pickaxe interface that searches for blame_usage:

	   $ git log --pretty=oneline -S'blame_usage'
	   5040f17eba15504bad66b14a645bddd9b015ebb7 blame -S <ancestry-file>
	   ea4c7f9bf69e781dd0cd88d2bccb2bf5cc15c9a7 git-blame: Make the output


OPTIONS
       -b
	   Show blank SHA-1 for boundary commits. This can also be controlled
	   via the blame.blankBoundary config option.

       --root
	   Do not treat root commits as boundaries. This can also be
	   controlled via the blame.showRoot config option.

       --show-stats
	   Include additional statistics at the end of blame output.

       -L <start>,<end>, -L :<funcname>
	   Annotate only the line range given by <start>,<end>, or by the
	   function name regex <funcname>. May be specified multiple times.
	   Overlapping ranges are allowed.

	   <start> and <end> are optional.  -L <start> or -L <start>, spans
	   from <start> to end of file.	 -L ,<end> spans from start of file to
	   <end>.

	   <start> and <end> can take one of these forms:

	   o   number

	       If <start> or <end> is a number, it specifies an absolute line
	       number (lines count from 1).

	   o   /regex/

	       This form will use the first line matching the given POSIX
	       regex. If <start> is a regex, it will search from the end of
	       the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of
	       file. If <start> is ^/regex/, it will search from the start of
	       file. If <end> is a regex, it will search starting at the line
	       given by <start>.

	   o   +offset or -offset

	       This is only valid for <end> and will specify a number of lines
	       before or after the line given by <start>.

	   If :<funcname> is given in place of <start> and <end>, it is a
	   regular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname
	   line that matches <funcname>, up to the next funcname line.
	   :<funcname> searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any,
	   otherwise from the start of file.  ^:<funcname> searches from the
	   start of file. The function names are determined in the same way as
	   git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom
	   hunk-header in gitattributes(5)).

       -l
	   Show long rev (Default: off).

       -t
	   Show raw timestamp (Default: off).

       -S <revs-file>
	   Use revisions from revs-file instead of calling git-rev-list(1).

       --reverse <rev>..<rev>
	   Walk history forward instead of backward. Instead of showing the
	   revision in which a line appeared, this shows the last revision in
	   which a line has existed. This requires a range of revision like
	   START..END where the path to blame exists in START.	git blame
	   --reverse START is taken as git blame --reverse START..HEAD for
	   convenience.

       --first-parent
	   Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit.
	   This option can be used to determine when a line was introduced to
	   a particular integration branch, rather than when it was introduced
	   to the history overall.

       -p, --porcelain
	   Show in a format designed for machine consumption.

       --line-porcelain
	   Show the porcelain format, but output commit information for each
	   line, not just the first time a commit is referenced. Implies
	   --porcelain.

       --incremental
	   Show the result incrementally in a format designed for machine
	   consumption.

       --encoding=<encoding>
	   Specifies the encoding used to output author names and commit
	   summaries. Setting it to none makes blame output unconverted data.
	   For more information see the discussion about encoding in the git-
	   log(1) manual page.

       --contents <file>
	   When <rev> is not specified, the command annotates the changes
	   starting backwards from the working tree copy. This flag makes the
	   command pretend as if the working tree copy has the contents of the
	   named file (specify - to make the command read from the standard
	   input).

       --date <format>
	   Specifies the format used to output dates. If --date is not
	   provided, the value of the blame.date config variable is used. If
	   the blame.date config variable is also not set, the iso format is
	   used. For supported values, see the discussion of the --date option
	   at git-log(1).

       --[no-]progress
	   Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default
	   when it is attached to a terminal. This flag enables progress
	   reporting even if not attached to a terminal. Can't use --progress
	   together with --porcelain or --incremental.

       -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.

       -C[<num>]
	   In addition to -M, detect lines moved or copied from other files
	   that were modified in the same commit. This is useful when you
	   reorganize your program and move code around across files. When
	   this option is given twice, the command additionally looks for
	   copies from other files in the commit that creates the file. When
	   this option is given three times, the command additionally looks
	   for copies from other files in any commit.

	   <num> is optional but it is the lower bound on the number of
	   alphanumeric characters that Git must detect as moving/copying
	   between files for it to associate those lines with the parent
	   commit. And the default value is 40. If there are more than one -C
	   options given, the <num> argument of the last -C will take effect.

       --ignore-rev <rev>
	   Ignore changes made by the revision when assigning blame, as if the
	   change never happened. Lines that were changed or added by an
	   ignored commit will be blamed on the previous commit that changed
	   that line or nearby lines. This option may be specified multiple
	   times to ignore more than one revision. If the
	   blame.markIgnoredLines config option is set, then lines that were
	   changed by an ignored commit and attributed to another commit will
	   be marked with a ?  in the blame output. If the
	   blame.markUnblamableLines config option is set, then those lines
	   touched by an ignored commit that we could not attribute to another
	   revision are marked with a *.

       --ignore-revs-file <file>
	   Ignore revisions listed in file, which must be in the same format
	   as an fsck.skipList. This option may be repeated, and these files
	   will be processed after any files specified with the
	   blame.ignoreRevsFile config option. An empty file name, "", will
	   clear the list of revs from previously processed files.

       --color-lines
	   Color line annotations in the default format differently if they
	   come from the same commit as the preceding line. This makes it
	   easier to distinguish code blocks introduced by different commits.
	   The color defaults to cyan and can be adjusted using the
	   color.blame.repeatedLines config option.

       --color-by-age
	   Color line annotations depending on the age of the line in the
	   default format. The color.blame.highlightRecent config option
	   controls what color is used for each range of age.

       -h
	   Show help message.

       -c
	   Use the same output mode as git-annotate(1) (Default: off).

       --score-debug
	   Include debugging information related to the movement of lines
	   between files (see -C) and lines moved within a file (see -M). The
	   first number listed is the score. This is the number of
	   alphanumeric characters detected as having been moved between or
	   within files. This must be above a certain threshold for git blame
	   to consider those lines of code to have been moved.

       -f, --show-name
	   Show the filename in the original commit. By default the filename
	   is shown if there is any line that came from a file with a
	   different name, due to rename detection.

       -n, --show-number
	   Show the line number in the original commit (Default: off).

       -s
	   Suppress the author name and timestamp from the output.

       -e, --show-email
	   Show the author email instead of author name (Default: off). This
	   can also be controlled via the blame.showEmail config option.

       -w
	   Ignore whitespace when comparing the parent's version and the
	   child's to find where the lines came from.

       --abbrev=<n>
	   Instead of using the default 7+1 hexadecimal digits as the
	   abbreviated object name, use <m>+1 digits, where <m> is at least
	   <n> but ensures the commit object names are unique. Note that 1
	   column is used for a caret to mark the boundary commit.

THE DEFAULT FORMAT
       When neither --porcelain nor --incremental option is specified, git
       blame will output annotation for each line with:

       o   abbreviated object name for the commit the line came from;

       o   author ident (by default author name and date, unless -s or -e is
	   specified); and

       o   line number

       before the line contents.

THE PORCELAIN FORMAT
       In this format, each line is output after a header; the header at the
       minimum has the first line which has:

       o   40-byte SHA-1 of the commit the line is attributed to;

       o   the line number of the line in the original file;

       o   the line number of the line in the final file;

       o   on a line that starts a group of lines from a different commit than
	   the previous one, the number of lines in this group. On subsequent
	   lines this field is absent.

       This header line is followed by the following information at least once
       for each commit:

       o   the author name ("author"), email ("author-mail"), time
	   ("author-time"), and time zone ("author-tz"); similarly for
	   committer.

       o   the filename in the commit that the line is attributed to.

       o   the first line of the commit log message ("summary").

       The contents of the actual line is output after the above header,
       prefixed by a TAB. This is to allow adding more header elements later.

       The porcelain format generally suppresses commit information that has
       already been seen. For example, two lines that are blamed to the same
       commit will both be shown, but the details for that commit will be
       shown only once. This is more efficient, but may require more state be
       kept by the reader. The --line-porcelain option can be used to output
       full commit information for each line, allowing simpler (but less
       efficient) usage like:

	   # count the number of lines attributed to each author
	   git blame --line-porcelain file |
	   sed -n 's/^author //p' |
	   sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

SPECIFYING RANGES
       Unlike git blame and git annotate in older versions of git, the extent
       of the annotation can be limited to both line ranges and revision
       ranges. The -L option, which limits annotation to a range of lines, may
       be specified multiple times.

       When you are interested in finding the origin for lines 40-60 for file
       foo, you can use the -L option like so (they mean the same thing --
       both ask for 21 lines starting at line 40):

	   git blame -L 40,60 foo
	   git blame -L 40,+21 foo

       Also you can use a regular expression to specify the line range:

	   git blame -L '/^sub hello {/,/^}$/' foo

       which limits the annotation to the body of the hello subroutine.

       When you are not interested in changes older than version v2.6.18, or
       changes older than 3 weeks, you can use revision range specifiers
       similar to git rev-list:

	   git blame v2.6.18.. -- foo
	   git blame --since=3.weeks -- foo

       When revision range specifiers are used to limit the annotation, lines
       that have not changed since the range boundary (either the commit
       v2.6.18 or the most recent commit that is more than 3 weeks old in the
       above example) are blamed for that range boundary commit.

       A particularly useful way is to see if an added file has lines created
       by copy-and-paste from existing files. Sometimes this indicates that
       the developer was being sloppy and did not refactor the code properly.
       You can first find the commit that introduced the file with:

	   git log --diff-filter=A --pretty=short -- foo

       and then annotate the change between the commit and its parents, using
       commit^! notation:

	   git blame -C -C -f $commit^! -- foo

INCREMENTAL OUTPUT
       When called with --incremental option, the command outputs the result
       as it is built. The output generally will talk about lines touched by
       more recent commits first (i.e. the lines will be annotated out of
       order) and is meant to be used by interactive viewers.

       The output format is similar to the Porcelain format, but it does not
       contain the actual lines from the file that is being annotated.

	1. Each blame entry always starts with a line of:

	       <40-byte hex sha1> <sourceline> <resultline> <num_lines>

	   Line numbers count from 1.

	2. The first time that a commit shows up in the stream, it has various
	   other information about it printed out with a one-word tag at the
	   beginning of each line describing the extra commit information
	   (author, email, committer, dates, summary, etc.).

	3. Unlike the Porcelain format, the filename information is always
	   given and terminates the entry:

	       "filename" <whitespace-quoted-filename-goes-here>

	   and thus it is really quite easy to parse for some line- and
	   word-oriented parser (which should be quite natural for most
	   scripting languages).

	       Note
	       For people who do parsing: to make it more robust, just ignore
	       any lines between the first and last one ("<sha1>" and
	       "filename" lines) where you do not recognize the tag words (or
	       care about that particular one) at the beginning of the
	       "extended information" lines. That way, if there is ever added
	       information (like the commit encoding or extended commit
	       commentary), a blame viewer will not care.

MAPPING AUTHORS
       See gitmailmap(5).

CONFIGURATION
       Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from
       the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as what's
       found there:

       blame.blankBoundary
	   Show blank commit object name for boundary commits in git-blame(1).
	   This option defaults to false.

       blame.coloring
	   This determines the coloring scheme to be applied to blame output.
	   It can be repeatedLines, highlightRecent, or none which is the
	   default.

       blame.date
	   Specifies the format used to output dates in git-blame(1). If unset
	   the iso format is used. For supported values, see the discussion of
	   the --date option at git-log(1).

       blame.showEmail
	   Show the author email instead of author name in git-blame(1). This
	   option defaults to false.

       blame.showRoot
	   Do not treat root commits as boundaries in git-blame(1). This
	   option defaults to false.

       blame.ignoreRevsFile
	   Ignore revisions listed in the file, one unabbreviated object name
	   per line, in git-blame(1). Whitespace and comments beginning with #
	   are ignored. This option may be repeated multiple times. Empty file
	   names will reset the list of ignored revisions. This option will be
	   handled before the command line option --ignore-revs-file.

       blame.markUnblamableLines
	   Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we could
	   not attribute to another commit with a * in the output of git-
	   blame(1).

       blame.markIgnoredLines
	   Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we
	   attributed to another commit with a ?  in the output of git-
	   blame(1).

SEE ALSO
       git-annotate(1)

GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite



Git 2.38.4			  05/16/2024			  GIT-BLAME(1)