Viewing the commit history

To look back into the commit history you can use the git log command. It’s the most basic and powerful tool.

git log

Output:

commit df436213eb18d9bf4b3783077fcee4426f3fe57e (HEAD -> master)
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:58:20 2022 +0530

    renamed books.md to fav-books.md

commit 5e6178cc3eec9b2e577180eb3f54678e210e3289
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:58:00 2022 +0530

    removed movies.md

commit eb889893e7d4ca7e0282cd6ee7e6dccf1da2e196
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:56:42 2022 +0530

    adding .gitignore

commit 25755bfdffb2ca7d574a2e2e1ebcad253406d283
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:55:59 2022 +0530

    adding one more movies and books

commit 50b43aedfa8ec3680efbac28037c126e7250cc06
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:55:37 2022 +0530

    adding my favourite movies and books

commit 8a9f3488528f43690b11621300cf45df56823d66
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:54:16 2022 +0530

    skipping the staging area

commit 7941f658a5b009db260b74c194fb98e392f3e486
Author: Ashish Juyal <ashish.juyal@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 29 12:53:49 2022 +0530

    making my first commit

By default, with no arguments, git log lists the commits made in that repository in reverse chronological order; that is, the most recent commits show up first. As you can see, this command lists each commit with its SHA-1 checksum, the author’s name and email, the date written, and the commit message.

Git log has a huge number of options, lets take a look at some of the most popular:

If you want to see some abbreviated stats for each commit.
```
  git log --stat
```
To change the default log output you can use few prebuilt option values. The oneline value for this option prints each commit on a single line, which is useful if you’re looking at a lot of commits. In addition, the short, full, and fuller values show the output in roughly the same format but with less or more information, respectively.
```
  git log --pretty=oneline
```

📋 Run the git log with short, full, and fuller and observe the differences.

To specify your own log output format, you can use the format value.
```
git log --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s"
```

|Specifier | Description of Output |:———|:—————————– |%H | Commit hash |%h | Abbreviated commit hash |%T |Tree hash |%t |Abbreviated tree hash |%P |Parent hashes |%p |Abbreviated parent hashes |%an| Author name |%ae| Author email |%ad| Author date (format respects the –date=option) |%ar| Author date, relative |%cn| Committer name |%ce| Committer email |%cd| Committer date |%cr| Committer date, relative |%s |Subject ————————————