Generating a List of Historical Changes

To find information about the history of a file or directory, use the svn log command. svn log will provide you with a record of who made changes to a file or directory, at what revision it changed, the time and date of that revision, and—if it was provided—the log message that accompanied the commit:

$ svn log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r3 | sally | 2008-05-15 23:09:28 -0500 (Thu, 15 May 2008) | 1 line

Added include lines and corrected # of cheese slices.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r2 | harry | 2008-05-14 18:43:15 -0500 (Wed, 14 May 2008) | 1 line

Added main() methods.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r1 | sally | 2008-05-10 19:50:31 -0500 (Sat, 10 May 2008) | 1 line

Initial import
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note that the log messages are printed in reverse chronological order by default. If you wish to see a different range of revisions in a particular order or just a single revision, pass the --revision (-r) option:

$ svn log -r 5:19    # shows logs 5 through 19 in chronological order

$ svn log -r 19:5    # shows logs 5 through 19 in reverse order

$ svn log -r 8       # shows log for revision 8

You can also examine the log history of a single file or directory. For example:

$ svn log foo.c
...
$ svn log http://foo.com/svn/trunk/code/foo.c
...

These will display log messages only for those revisions in which the working file (or URL) changed.

Why Does svn log Not Show Me What I Just Committed?

If you make a commit and immediately type svn log with no arguments, you may notice that your most recent commit doesn’t show up in the list of log messages. This is due to a combination of the behavior of svn commit and the default behavior of svn log. First, when you commit changes to the repository, svn bumps only the revision of files (and directories) that it commits, so usually the parent directory remains at the older revision (See Updates and commits are separate for an explanation). svn log then defaults to fetching the history of the directory at its current revision, and thus you don’t see the newly committed changes. The solution here is to either update your working copy or explicitly provide a revision number to svn log by using the --revision (-r) option.

If you want even more information about a file or directory, svn log also takes a --verbose (-v) option. Because Subversion allows you to move and copy files and directories, it is important to be able to track path changes in the filesystem. So, in verbose mode, svn log will include a list of changed paths in a revision in its output:

$ svn log -r 8 -v
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r8 | sally | 2008-05-21 13:19:25 -0500 (Wed, 21 May 2008) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/code/foo.c
   M /trunk/code/bar.h
   A /trunk/code/doc/README

Frozzled the sub-space winch.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

svn log also takes a --quiet (-q) option, which suppresses the body of the log message. When combined with --verbose, it gives just the names of the changed files.

Why Does svn log Give Me an Empty Response?

After working with Subversion for a bit, most users will come across something like this:

$ svn log -r 2
------------------------------------------------------------------------
$

At first glance, this seems like an error. But recall that while revisions are repository-wide, svn log operates on a path in the repository. If you supply no path, Subversion uses the current working directory as the default target. As a result, if you’re operating in a subdirectory of your working copy and attempt to see the log of a revision in which neither that directory nor any of its children were changed, Subversion will show you an empty log. If you want to see what changed in that revision, try pointing svn log directly at the topmost URL of your repository, as in svn log -r 2 http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn.

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