Looking at the commit log
Once you have made multiple commits, you can see these commits, their dates, commit messages, author, etc. by typing git log. This command will open a scrollable interface (using the up/down arrow keys) that shows every commit you have made so far in the repository. You can get out this interface by pressing the q key. As we saw earlier, you can also see the history of commits through GitHub’s web interface, but it is also useful to be able to access the commit log directly from the terminal, without having to open a browser.
Run the command git log from either the repository in your home directory (/home/USER/capp30121/camp-1-YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME) or in the temp directory (/tmp/USER/capp30121/camp-1-YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME). You should see output that looks something like this
commit 7abeffd2ba2a00ed697b25d90af18bd803d44588 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD)
Author: GITHUB_USER <GITHUB_EMAIL>
Date: Fri Aug 5 08:26:46 2022 -0500
update test.txt
commit 19a476da446d473adf91838bedfcd44f21f4fcbe
Author: GITHUB_USER <GITHUB_EMAIL>
Date: Mon Aug 1 10:53:58 2022 -0500
final changes to favorite-things.txt
commit 094b3e89238ae2b9383b26e08e4b90150b95ce08
Author: GITHUB_USER <GITHUB_EMAIL>
Date: Mon Aug 1 10:47:20 2022 -0500
add favorite-things.txt
Each commit has a commit hash (usually referred to as the commit SHA) that looks something like this:
7abeffd2ba2a00ed697b25d90af18bd803d44588
This is a unique identifier that we can use to refer to a commit elsewhere. For example, choose any commit from the commit log and run the following:
git show COMMIT_SHA
Make sure to replace COMMIT_SHA with a commit SHA that appears in your commit log.
This command will show you the changes that were included in that commit. The output of git show can be a bit hard to parse at first but the most important thing to take into account is that any line starting with a + denotes a line that was added, and any line starting with a - denotes a line that was removed. (Recall that this is the same formatting we saw when using git diff to show the pending changes to a file in the first Git lab.)
In any place where you have to refer to a commit SHA, you can just write the first few characters of the commit SHA. For example, for commit
9119c6ffcebc2e3540d587180236aaf1222ee63cwe could write just this:git show 9119c6fGit will only complain if there is more than one commit that starts with that same prefix.