Is there a way to know or get the original create/modified timestamps?
16 Answers
I believe that the only timestamps recorded in the Git database are the author and commit timestamps. I don't see an option for Git to modify the file's timestamp to match the most recent commit, and it makes sense that this wouldn't be the default behavior (because if it were, Makefiles wouldn't work correctly).
You could write a script to set the modification date of your files to the the time of the most recent commit. It might look something like this:
# No arguments? Recursively list all git-controlled files in $PWD and start over
if [ $# = 0 ]; then
git ls-files -z |xargs -0 sh "$0"
exit $?
fi
for file in "$@"; do
time="$(git log --pretty=format:%cd -n 1 \
--date=format:%Y%m%d%H%M.%S --date-order -- "$file")"
if [ -z "$time" ]; then
echo "ERROR: skipping '$file' -- no git log found" >&2
continue
fi
touch -m -t "$time" "$file"
done
This accepts specific files as arguments or else updates each git-controlled file in the current directory or its children. This is done in a manner that permits spaces and even line breaks in filenames since git ls-files -z outputs a null-terminated file list and xargs -0 parses null-terminated lists into arguments.
This will take a while if you have a lot of files.
NO, Git simply does not store such (meta-)information, unless you use third-party tools like metastore or git-cache-meta. The only timestamp that get stored is the time a patch/change was created (author time), and the time the commit was created (committer time).
That is by design, as Git is a version control system, not a backup utility or synchronization tool.
I hope you appreciate the simplicity:
# getcheckin - Retrieve the last committed checkin date and time for
# each of the files in the git project. After a "pull"
# of the project, you can update the timestamp on the
# pulled files to match that date/time. There are many
# that believe that this is not a good idea, but
# I found it useful to get the right source file dates
#
# NOTE: This script produces commands suitable for
# piping into BASH or other shell
# License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States
# (CC by 3.0 US)
##########
# walk back to the project parent or the relative pathnames don't make
# sense
##########
while [ ! -d ./.git ]
do
cd ..
done
echo "cd $(pwd)"
##########
# Note that the date format is ISO so that touch will work
##########
git ls-tree -r --full-tree HEAD |\
sed -e "s/.*\t//" | while read filename; do
echo "touch --date=\"$(git log -1 --date=iso --format="%ad" -- "$filename")\" -m $filename"
done
In CentOS 7 you have /usr/share/doc/rsync-*/support/git-set-file-times and in Debian (and derivatives) the same script in /usr/share/doc/rsync/scripts/git-set-file-times.gz. The original is from Eric Wong and is at https://yhbt.net/git-set-file-times.
It works faster than other examples mentioned here and you may find it more handy to have it already on your Linux distribution.
Git doesn't support storing file dates.
But you can use git-meta, which is git-cache-meta turned into a up-to-date repository (all of the comments in the gist were implemented); now it is installable as a Git hook, so it will automatically store metadata on every commit!
So, Git doesn't support storing files' metadata by default; but it doesn't mean you can't be modding it with custom features (LFS is a proof of how you can extend Git).
Here's mine.
A little quicker than some others, as I'm not calling 'get log' for each file found; instead, calling 'git log' once and transforming that output into touch commands.
There'll be cases where there are too many listed files in 1 commit to fit into a single shell command buffer; run "getconf ARG_MAX" to see the max length of a command in bytes - on my Debian install, it's 2 MB, which is plenty.
# Set file last modification time to last commit of file
git log --reverse --date=iso --name-only | \
grep -vE "^(commit |Merge:|Author:| |^$)" | \
grep -B 1 "^[^D][^a][^t][^e][^:][^ ]" | \
grep -v "^\-\-" | \
sed "s|^\(.*\)$|\"\1\"|;s|^\"Date: *\(.*\)\"$|~touch -c -m -d'\1'|" | \
tr '~\n' '\n ' | \
sh -
Description by line:
- earliest-first list of commits and filenames
- filter out unneeded commit/merge/author lines
- filter out lines starting with double-dash
- sed (stream-edit) command a) prepend/append double-quote to lines, and b) replace "Date: ." with ~touch -c -m -d. ( the touch command options are -c = don't create if it doesn't exist, -m = change file modification time, and -d = use the provided date/time )
- translate tilde (~) and newline (\n) characters to newline and space, respectively
- pipe the resulting stream of text lines into a shell.
In terms of speed, it 5 seconds 1700 commits for 6500 files in 700 directories.
for file in `find . -type f -not -path "./.git/*"`; do
touch -d "`git rev-list -n 1 HEAD \$file | xargs git show -s --format=%ai`" $file;
done
Related