Question

Say I have a file foo.js that was committed some time ago. I would like to
simply find the commit where this file was first added.

After reading the answers and my own tinkering, this works for me

git log --follow --diff-filter=A --find-renames=40% -- foo.js

Answer 1

Here’s simpler, "pure Git" way to do it, with no pipeline needed:

git log --diff-filter=A -- foo.js

Check the documentation. You can do the same thing for Deleted, Modified, etc.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt—diff-filterACDMRTUXB82308203

I have a handy alias for this, because I always forget it:

git config --global alias.whatadded "log --diff-filter=A"

This makes it as simple as:

git whatadded -- foo.js

---

The below one liner will recursively search through sub directories of the $PWD for foo.js without having to supply an absolute or relative path to the file, nor will the file need to be in the same directory as the $PWD

git log --diff-filter=A -- **foo.js