Question

Is it possible to see who edited a specific line before the commit reported by git blame, like a history of commits for a given line?

For example, I run the following (on the superb uncrustify project):

$ git blame -L10,+1 src/options.cpp
^fe25b6d (Ben Gardner 2009-10-17 13:13:55 -0500 10) #include "prototypes.h"

How can I find out who edited that line before commit fe25b6d? And who edited it before that commit?

Answer 1

git blame -L 10,+1 fe25b6d^ -- src/options.cpp

You can specify a revision for git blame to look back starting from (instead of the default of HEAD); fe25b6d^ is the parent of fe25b6d.

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Edit: New to Git 2.23, we have the --ignore-rev option added to git blame:

git blame --ignore-rev fe25b6d

While this doesn’t answer OP’s question of giving the stack of commits (you’ll use git log for that, as per the other answer), it is a better way of this solution, as you won’t potentially misblame the other lines.