Git tips: Getting the first commit date of a file

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USAGE: git-first-commit-date [–bare|-b] file…

Setup

Directives

use strict; use warnings;

Modules

use Getopt::Long;

Options

–bare means don't put the filename in the line. Otherwise it will

–put the filename, followed by a colon and a space.

my $bare = 0;

&GetOptions( “b|bare!” => $bare, );

Go through the input files.

while (@ARGV) { # Pull out the filename. my $filename = shift @ARGV; my $reason = "<missing>"; my $valid = 0;

if (-f $filename)
{
    # Get the date for the file. We tell Git to only give us the
    # ISO date (https://xkcd.com/1179/) for the files using
    # --pretty=format:%ad --date=short. We use --follow to handle
    # renames. Finally, we get the last one (the earliest
    # date). --reverse didn't seem to work, so we skip that.
    $reason = `git log --follow --pretty=format:%ad --date=short "$filename" | tail -n 1`;
    chomp $reason;

    # If we have a date, use it. Otherwise say it is untracked.
    $reason = "<untracked>" if $reason =~ /^\s*$/s;
}

# Write out the results.
if (!$bare)
{
    print "$filename: ";
}

# Print out the reason which will be <untracked>, <missing>, or a
# date.
print $reason, "\n";

}