Find git commits that delete files

While working on a Django ticket, I found myself doing some git archeology and learned a new (to) me flag for git log which I thought I'd share.

The problem statement

I wanted to find commits that had removed or renamed a file inside a specific directory (docs/ in this case).

I've been doing git archeology for long enough that I know that when the problem statement starts with "I want to find a commit that ..." then the solution probably involves git log and this time was no different.

None of my searches were turning up anything interesting, only solutions for "how to find the commit where file X was deleted", so I decided to read through the manual for git log.

After some trial and error involving --stat and --dirstat, I finally found what I wanted by looking for the word "deleted" inside the man page.

The solution: --diff-filter

Here's the command I ended up with:

git log --diff-filter=RD --stat -- docs/

Some explanations:

• git log will list commits (all of them by default, in reverse order from newest to oldest);
• --diff-filter=RD will only list commits that either deleted (D) or renamed (R) a file;
• --stat will show some statistics on the commit, in that case showing which was was deleted/renamed;
• finally, -- docs/ restricts the commits to those involving files inside the docs/ directory.

Have fun exploring your git repositories! ⛏️