How to see the file size history of a single file in a git repository?

Question

Is there anyway to see how a file\'s size has changed through time in a git repository? I want to see how my main.js file (which is the combination of several files and mini

Answer 1

Here is a Bash function that will report the size over time in the following format.

 LoC  Date                       Commit ID   Subject
 942  2019-08-31 18:09:34 +0200  35fc67c122  Declare some XML namespaces in replacement of OGCPrefixMapper, which has been removed from Apache SIS. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SIS-126
 943  2019-08-09 16:52:29 +0200  e8438ab869  fix(GML): fix relative path resolving inside a jar
 934  2019-08-05 15:37:46 +0200  1e0c0b03c4  fix(GML): fix all test cases
 932  2019-07-30 15:54:53 +0200  fddea5db24  feat(GML): work on fallback for non-xsd Feature store
 932  2019-07-23 16:40:23 +0200  8d9a6a7dd0  feat(GML): improve support for custom XML mappings
 932  2019-06-26 15:18:43 +0200  43ea6e0bd7  feat(GML): add concurrency support for read/write operations
 932  2019-06-21 09:27:41 +0200  07a9993b4b  feat(GML): support group reference min/max occurs attributes
 932  2019-06-21 09:27:41 +0200  352a9104ae  feat(GML): fix resolving local files xsd paths
 919  2018-06-08 15:41:26 +0200  01ac7538e7  Merge branch 'master' into sis-migration
 919  2018-05-16 16:40:04 +0200  16fe7590c5  fix(JAXP): various fix for  WFS 2.0.0
 912  2018-04-11 10:09:22 +0200  bf3a38bdc4  chore(*): update JTS version 1.15.0
 912  2017-11-09 20:15:23 +0100  bc14dc4be1  fix(Client): fix minor problems on WFS querying
 901  2017-10-20 11:41:43 +0200  f686d7ff15  feat(Storage): add support for GML 2.1.2
 882  2017-05-16 23:07:31 +0200  f20c34c1e2  refactor(Feature): renamed the Geotk flavor of org.apache.sis.feature package as org.geotoolkit.feature.

Here is the function:

git-log-size() {
    git rev-list HEAD -- "$1" | while read cid; do
        git cat-file blob "$cid:$1" | wc -l | tr -d '\n'
        echo -n $'\t'
        git log -1 "--pretty=%ci%x09%h%x09%s" $cid
    done | column -t -s$'\t'
}

It is not particularly efficient, but does the job. It uses some utilities which are pretty common (wc, tr, column).

The size is reported as lines of code (LoC) since this is the common metric in software development, just change the "-l" option of wc if you prefer something else.

Here is how to call it:

git-log-size