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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T19:56:09+00:00

Is there a way, short of actually checking out the parent commit, to determine

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Is there a way, short of actually checking out the parent commit, to determine a submodule’s SHA-1 commit ID based on a commit ID in the parent clone? I know I can find the currently associated SHA-1 with git submodule.

Here’s an example:

  • I have a clone with a single submodule foo that has changed several times in the last month.
  • I have a tag in the parent clone that is a few weeks old called released-1.2.3. I want to find out what the associated SHA-1 of foo was for this tagged commit.
  • I could simply check out released-1.2.3 and use git submodule to see, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to do this without affecting the working tree, as I want to script it.

I want to do this because I want to construct a script to do a ‘diff’ on all changes within a submodule between two commits within the parent repository – i.e. “tell me what files changed within the submodule foo between these two commits in the parent.”

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You may use git-ls-tree to see what the SHA-1 id of a given path was during a given commit:

    $ git ls-tree released-1.2.3 foo
160000 commit c0f065504bb0e8cfa2b107e975bb9dc5a34b0398  foo

    (My first thought was git show released-1.2.3 foo, but that fails with “fatal: bad object”.)

    Since you are scripting the output, you will probably want to get just the SHA-1 id by itself, e.g.:

    $ git ls-tree released-1.2.3 foo | awk '{print $3}'
c0f065504bb0e8cfa2b107e975bb9dc5a34b0398

    Also: When writing scripts around git, try to stick to the plumbing commands, as described in the manual. They have a more stable interface, while the more familiar “porcelain” commands will possibly change in incompatible ways.

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