Re: finding deleted file names

On 7/3/08, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 12:15:37PM +0930, Geoff Russell wrote:

 > >> Is there something that says "since repository creation", ie., go back as far
 > >> as possible, but no further? Is there a symbolic name for the initial commit?
 > >
 > > There's no symbolic name for it, since there might not be only one initial
 > > commit. git.git for example has at least three root commits. You will
 > > probably get what you want with $(git rev-list HEAD|tail -1). If your
 > > history is very large, $(git rev-list --reverse HEAD|head -1) is slightly
 > > faster, but usually not enough to offset typing --reverse :).
 >
 > Thanks for this, but I'm a little confused.
 >
 > If I do a "git init", there must be a first commit after this? Isn't
 > this the first commit, how
 > can there be more than one first commit?


The confusing part is that you two are talking about two slightly
 different things. If you define "initial commit" as "the commit which
 has no parents" then there can be many (you get a new one anytime you
 merge in a project with unrelated history).

 However, what Geoff originally mentioned was HEAD{'7 days ago'}, which
 actually looks in the reflog. So if you define "initial commit" as "the
 first commit value that this ref ever had" then there is only one
 (though of course, your reflog will eventually expire, so it won't be
 "the oldest value this ref ever had" but rather "the oldest one the
 reflog ever remembers it having").

You guys are (quite properly) worried about all the edge cases and I
have probably
confused things by using the reflog when they may be a better way of
doing things.

Perhaps if I describe the problem, there may be a better solution than using the
reflog.  I've made a bunch of changes to a repository, a few weeks
later I figure I've
deleted a file I need but am not really sure of its name. So I want to list the
files that I've deleted during the past few weeks. So the aim is to
find the files that
aren't in the current working directory but that are in some commit done since
day X.

Cheers,
Geoff

 -Peff

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