Subversion file history

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. 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? It will print the file with each line prefixed by the time and author of the commit that last changed it. 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. That will get you a list of revisions where the file changed, which you can then use to script repeated calls to svn diff. 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. 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.

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. I added -r to the sort. I removed spec. 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. I've seen a bunch of partial answers while researching this topic. This is what worked for me and hope it helps others.

This command will display output on the command line, showing the revision number, author, revision timestamp and changes made:. To make your search easier, you can write the output to a file and grep for what you're looking for. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow.

When you invoke svn log with the --diff option, Subversion will append to each revision log chunk in the log report a diff -style difference report. This is a very convenient way to see both the high-level, semantic changes and the line-based modifications of a revision all at the same time! Using svn cat and svn list , you can view various revisions of files and directories without changing the working revision of your working copy.

In fact, you don't even need a working copy to use either one. If you want to examine an earlier version of a file and not necessarily the differences between two files, you can use svn cat :. Very similar to the svn cat command we discussed in the previous section is the svn annotate command. This command also displays the contents of a versioned file, but it does so using a tabular format. Each line of output shows not only a line of the file's content but also the username, the revision number and optionally the datestamp of the revision in which that line was last modified.

When used with a working copy file target, svn annotate will by default show line-by-line attribution of the file as it currently appears in the working copy. Notice that for some lines, there is no attribution provided. In this case, that's because those lines have been modified in the working copy's version of the file. In this way, svn annotate becomes another way for you to see which lines in the file you have changed.

The --verbose -v option causes svn annotate to also include on each line the datestamp associated with that line's reported revision number. This adds a significant amount of width to each line of ouput, so we'll skip the demonstration here. As with svn cat , you can also ask svn annotate to display previous versions of the file. This can be a handy trick when, after finding out who most recently modified a particular line of interest in the file, you then wish to see who modified the same line prior to that.

As revealed in the error message, you can use the --force option to disable this check and proceed with the annotation as if the file's contents are, in fact, human-readable and line-based. Naturally, if you force Subversion to try to perform line-based annotation on a nontextual file, you'll get what you asked for: a screenful of nonsense.

Depending on your mood at the time you execute this command and your reasons for doing so, you may find yourself typing svn blame … or svn praise … instead of using the canonical svn annotate command form. That's okay—the Subversion developers anticipated as much, so those particular command aliases work, too! Finally, as with many of Subversion's informational commands, you can also reference files in your svn annotate command invocations by their repository URLs, allowing access to this information even when you don't have ready access to a working copy.

The svn list command shows you what files are in a repository directory without actually downloading the files to your local machine:. If you want a more detailed listing, pass the --verbose -v flag to get output like this:.

The columns tell you the revision at which the file or directory was last modified, the user who modified it, the size if it is a file, the date it was last modified, and the item's name.

The svn list command with no arguments defaults to the repository URL of the current working directory, not the local working copy directory. After all, if you want a listing of your local directory, you could use just plain ls or any reasonable non-Unixy equivalent. If you'd prefer to create a whole new working copy from an older snapshot, you can do so by modifying the typical svn checkout command.

As with svn update , you can provide the --revision -r option. Lastly, if you're building a release and wish to bundle up your versioned files and directories, you can use svn export to create a local copy of all or part of your repository without any.

While CollabNet started the project, and still funds a large chunk of the work it pays the salaries of a few full-time Subversion developers , Subversion is run like most open source projects, governed by a loose, transparent set of rules that encourage meritocracy. In , CollabNet worked with the Subversion developers towards the goal of integrating the Subversion project into the Apache Software Foundation ASF , one of the most well-known collectives of open source projects in the world.

Subversion's technical roots, community priorities, and development practices were a perfect fit for the ASF, many of whose members were already active Subversion contributors.

On one end is a Subversion repository that holds all of your versioned data. On the other end is your Subversion client program, which manages local reflections of portions of that versioned data. Between these extremes are multiple routes through a Repository Access RA layer, some of which go across computer networks and through network servers which then access the repository, others of which bypass the network altogether and access the repository directly.

Subversion, once installed, has a number of different pieces. The following is a quick overview of what you get. Don't be alarmed if the brief descriptions leave you scratching your head— plenty more pages in this book are devoted to alleviating that confusion. A program for reporting the state in terms of revisions of the items present of a working copy.

A custom standalone server program, runnable as a daemon process or invokable by SSH; another way to make your repository available to others over a network. The first edition of this book was published by O'Reilly Media in , shortly after Subversion had reached 1. Since that time, the Subversion project has continued to release new major releases of the software. Here's a quick summary of major new changes since Subversion 1.

Release 1. While the Berkeley DB backend is still widely used and supported, FSFS has since become the default choice for newly created repositories due to its low barrier to entry and minimal maintenance requirements.

Also in this release came the ability to put symbolic links under version control, auto-escaping of URLs, and a localized user interface. While Subversion is still a fundamentally concurrent version control system, certain types of binary files e. The locking feature fulfills the need to version and protect such resources.

With locking also came a complete WebDAV auto-versioning implementation, allowing Subversion repositories to be mounted as network folders. Finally, Subversion 1. The Apache server, however, gained some new logging features of its own, and Subversion's API bindings to other languages also made great leaps forward. Major parts of the working copy metadata were revamped to no longer use XML resulting in client-side speed gains , while the Berkeley DB repository backend gained the ability to automatically recover itself after a server crash.

This was a huge boon for users, and pushed Subversion far beyond the abilities of CVS and into the ranks of commercial competitors such as Perforce and ClearCase. Subversion 1.

Also, the command-line client introduced a new shortcut syntax for referring to Subversion repository URLs. You are reading Version Control with Subversion for Subversion 1. Fitzpatrick, and C. Michael Pilato. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License v2. What Is Subversion? Prev Preface Next.