Diffing files into arbitrary versions in Git
This article discusses how to compare a single file to a revision in Git. If you have a file with 30 iterations in a branch of your repository, you can compare the current revision to any other revision.
Let’s see how to do this.
Diffing files into arbitrary versions in Git
For a simpler context, let's assume we have a README.md file in our master branch that contains thirty iterations. We can run the following command to:
$ git diff master~25:README.md README.md
Compare our current README.md file with the one from 25 revisions ago in our master branch. Remember, this command compares the old README.md file with the version in our working tree.
To compare with the version committed in our master branch, we will run:
$ git diff master~25:README.md master:README.md
Alternatively, you can use the commit's SHA-1 . Follow these steps.
First, we will retrieve the SHA-1 of the commit with the version of the file we need . Run the git log command as shown below.
$ git log --README.md
Note the SHA-1 of the versions you want to compare and run the following command.
$ git diff SHA-1:README.md README.md
We can also use this method to differentiate subdirectories within the repository as shown below.
$ git diff <revision>: bar/ HEAD:bar/
In summary, Git allows us to compare a single file version with any version in our repository. We have already covered how to diff revisions of a single file.
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