How can I view all historical changes to a file in SVN

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

There's no built-in command for it, so I usually just do something like this:

#!/bin/bash

# history_of_file
#
# 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.

function history_of_file() {
    url=$1 # current url of file
    svn log -q $url | grep -E -e "^r[[:digit:]]+" -o | cut -c2- | sort -n | {

#       first revision as full text
        echo
        read r
        svn log -r$r $url@HEAD
        svn cat -r$r $url@HEAD
        echo

#       remaining revisions as differences to previous revision
        while read r
        do
            echo
            svn log -r$r $url@HEAD
            svn diff -c$r $url@HEAD
            echo
        done
    }
}

Then, you can call it with:

history_of_file $1

Answer 2

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 3

If you want to see whole history of a file with code changes :

svn log --diff [path_to_file] > log.txt

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

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 9

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:

svn blame -v <filename>

To make your search easier, you can write the output to a file and grep for what you're looking for.