Re: Retrieving a file in git that was deleted and committed

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 11:07:00PM -0800, biswaranjan panda wrote:

> Thanks! Strangely git log --follow does work.

I suspect it would work even without --follow. When you limit a log
traversal with a pathspec, like:

  git log foo

that is not about following some continuous stream of content, but
rather just applying that pathspec to the diff of each commit, and
pruning ones where it did not change. So even if there are gaps where
the file did not exist, we continue to apply the pathspec to the older
commits.

Tools like git-blame will _not_ work, though, as they really are trying
to track the content as they walk back through history. And Once all of
the content seems to appear from nowhere in your new commit, that seems
like a dead end.

In theory there could be some machine-readable annotation in the commit
object (or in a note created after the fact) to say "even though 'foo'
is a new file here, it came from $commit:foo".  And then git-blame could
keep following the content there. But such a feature does not yet exist.

-Peff