CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Ryan Baker
Ryan Baker

Reputation: 303

"git blame" a file access control modifier

I noticed that a couple .txt files in my git repository have execute permissions. I also noticed that when I did chmod a-x *.txt the repo actually showed changes. Here is the output of the git diff after updating the files.

diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
old mode 100755
new mode 100644

Is there a way to blame permissions of a file? (specifically I'd like to find out who added the a+x permissions to these files.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 632

Answers (3)

Hi-Angel
Hi-Angel

Reputation: 5659

--summary option of git-log provides the "mode change" information.

So you can execute git log --follow --summary -- requirements.txt, and then type /mode (or /\bmode\b for regex) to trigger the search for mode word via the pager means. Use n to navigate to the next occurrence.

It's a better way than the accepted answer, because it doesn't require changing the codebase (the checkouts that git-bisect does) and should be faster for the same reason.

Moreover, to my knowledge it is the best way, because I invested quite some time into the research, digging through docs, posts and experimenting, and the conclusion is that git has very few search capabilities for permission mode specifically. It can't search them, has no --diff-filter for them and lacks --format parameter to only show mode changes. So git-log with --summary and some kind of text-search via the output is your best bet.

Upvotes: 0

ArturFH
ArturFH

Reputation: 1787

You have probably used git diff command with some commits specified to get the results shown in your question. Let's assume the command was:

git diff goodcommit..badcommit requirements.txt

In case you omitted ..badcommit part, assume the badcommit is HEAD. You can easily find the offending commit (and a culprit) by running following sequence of commands:

git bisect start badcommit goodcommit
git bisect run test ! -x requirements.txt

and wait for finish. At the end you will get a message like:

running test ! -x requirements.txt
8088473809f905bd8f3d5825983e8c9fe82b10c6 is the first bad commit
commit 8088473809f905bd8f3d5825983e8c9fe82b10c6
Author: author
Date:   Fri Jun 16 23:05:49 2017 +0100

    commit message

To get back to normal work, just run:

git bisect reset

Upvotes: 5

Peter Reid
Peter Reid

Reputation: 5407

Git only stores the file contents, and execute bit value. See this answer for further info. So it will not reflect any other permission changes.

You can use:

git log --follow -p -- a/requirements.txt

to view the history of a file.

Upvotes: 1

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