How can I view all historical changes to a file in

Question

I know that I can svn diff -r a:b repo to view the changes between the two specified revisions. What I'd like is a diff for every revision that changed the file. Is such a command available?

Answer 1

The oddly named "blame" command does this. If you use Tortoise, it gives you a "from revision" dialog, then a file listing with a line by line indicator of Revision number and author next to it.

If you right click on the revision info, you can bring up a "Show log" dialog that gives full checkin information, along with other files that were part of the checkin.

Answer 2

Start with

svn log -q file | grep '^r' | cut -f1 -d' '

That will get you a list of revisions where the file changed, which you can then use to script repeated calls to svn diff.

Answer 3

Slightly different from what you described, but I think this might be what you actually need:

svn blame filename

It will print the file with each line prefixed by the time and author of the commit that last changed it.

Answer 4

As far as I know there is no built in svn command to accomplish this. You would need to write a script to run several commands to build all the diffs. A simpler approach would be to use a GUI svn client if that is an option. Many of them such as the subversive plugin for Eclipse will list the history of a file as well as allow you to view the diff of each revision.

Answer 5

Thanks, Bendin. I like your solution very much.

I changed it to work in reverse order, showing most recent changes first. Which is important with long standing code, maintained over several years. I usually pipe it into more.

svnhistory elements.py |more

I added -r to the sort. I removed spec. handling for 'first record'. It is it will error out on the last entry, as there is nothing to diff it with. Though I am living with it because I never get down that far.

#!/bin/bash                                                                    

# history_of_file                                                              
#                                                                              
# Bendin on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/282802          
#   Outputs the full history of a given file as a sequence of                  
#   logentry/diff pairs.  The first revision of the file is emitted as         
#   full text since there's not previous version to compare it to.             
#                                                                              
# Dlink                                                                        
#   Made to work in reverse order                                              

function history_of_file() {
    url=$1 # current url of file                                               
    svn log -q $url | grep -E -e "^r[[:digit:]]+" -o | cut -c2- | sort -nr | {
        while read r
    do
            echo
            svn log -r$r $url@HEAD
            svn diff -c$r $url@HEAD
            echo
    done
    }
}

history_of_file $1

Answer 6

You could use git-svn to import the repository into a Git repository, then use git log -p filename. This shows each log entry for the file followed by the corresponding diff.