Git - list all authors of a folder of files?

Based on The shortest possible output from git log containing author and date

do this

git log --pretty=format:"%an%x09" myfolder | sort | uniq

If you want only the list of authors of a repository:

git ls-files | xargs -n1 git blame --line-porcelain | sed -n 's/^author //p' | sort -d | uniq

If you want to do it for a file order by the number of lines of code contributions it is simple:

git blame --line-porcelain "_MY_FILE_" | sed -n 's/author //p' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

If you want to do it for the whole repository also ordered by code contributions:

git ls-files | xargs -n1 git blame --line-porcelain | sed -n 's/^author //p' | sort -f | uniq -ic | sort -nr


Actually, there is a native Git command for that, git shortlog:

git shortlog -n -s -- myfolder

The options do:

  • Option -s just shows the number of commits per contributor. Without it, the command lists the individual commits per author.
  • Option -n sorts the authors by number of commits (descending order) instead of alphabetical.

What is -- good for?

And just in case you have not encountered a loose -- in a git command yet: it is a separator option to mark that what follows cannot be a <revspec> (range of commits), but only a <pathspec> (file and folder names). That means: if you would omit the -- and by accident had a branch or tag named myfolder, the command git shortlog -n -s myfolder would not filter for the directory myfolder, but instead filter for history of branch or tag "myfolder". This separator is therefore useful (and necessary) in a number of git commands, like log or checkout, whenever you want to be clear whether what you specify is either a revision (commmit, branch, tag) or a path (folder or file name). And of course, this site already has a question on this.

Tags:

Git