Git commit date

Question

Other than parsing git log for the date string, is there a Git native way to report the date of a certain commit?

Marigolde

Good stuff : git-scm.com/docs/pretty-formats – Kisser

Answer 1

The show command may be what you want. Try

git show --no-patch --format=%ci <commit>

Other formats for the date string are available as well. Check the manual page for details.

Capetian

To get the commit without its diff, use log -1 instead of show. – Oraliaoralie

Or add the '-s' to the command: git show -s --format="%ci" <commit> – Paphos

For future users: you can view the author date with %ai. – Resect

@Mehrdad I'm looking to accomplish this with all the files in a repo git ls-tree -r --name-only HEAD sent through a loop doesn't give me a specific date-time. – Maund

to get just unix timestamp: use git show -s --format=%ct <commit> – Guidon

If you want another date format, you can use git show -s --format=%cd --date=short <commit> (will give e.g. 2016-11-02) or git show -s --format=%cd --date=short <commit> or git show -s --format=%cd --date=format:%Y <commit> (this example will print only the year) For details see this answer. – Ecklund

It is significantly faster to use log -1 rather than show -s for large merge commits so I definitely recommend using log -1 if you are trying to find stale branches. This sped it up from hours to minutes in the case of the monorepo I'm working with right now. – Michal

git show -s --format=%ci is what I wanted (for most recent commit) – Allelomorph

The git show -s variant will sometimes output some extra information beyond the date (Tagger: someone and some log message), I don’t know if this is a bug in GIT or some intended behaviour, but git log -1 does not do this. – Enthusiastic

Answer 2

If you want to see only the date of a tag you'd do:

git show -s --format=%ci <mytagname>^{commit}

which gives: 2013-11-06 13:22:37 +0100

Or do:

git show -s --format=%ct <mytagname>^{commit}

which gives UNIX timestamp: 1383740557

Tepic

This seems to give the date of the commit a tag points to, not the date of the tag its self. – Palmetto

@Palmetto tags only have metadata (like date) if it's annotated – Operant

I tried to verify that, but now I get the same result for all tags I create, annotated or not, and it is neither the tagging date nor the commits date. I guess something is wrong on my side. – Palmetto

Answer 3

If you like to have the timestamp without the timezone but local timezone do

git log -1 --format=%cd --date=local

Which gives this depending on your location

Mon Sep 28 12:07:37 2015

Washbasin

Is it possible to apply this for all the commits all in once? – Germinal

Answer 4

In case that you want to format the date (or hour) by yourself:

git show -s --date=format:'%Y%m%d-%H%M' --format=%cd  <commit id | default is the last commit>

# example output:
20210712-1948

Drolet

Answer 5

You can use the git show command.

To get the last commit date from git repository in a long(Unix epoch timestamp):

• Command: git show -s --format=%ct
• Result: 1605103148

Note: You can visit the git-show documentation to get a more detailed description of the options.

Babyblueeyes

Answer 6

if you got troubles with windows cmd command and .bat just escape percents like that

git show -s --format=%%ct

The % character has a special meaning for command line parameters and FOR parameters. To treat a percent as a regular character, double it: %%

Syntax : Escape Characters, Delimiters and Quotes

Triste

Answer 7

I know the question was asked a long time ago and I don't know which version of git this was.

For git version 2.37.3 the command

git show -s

will show the author date, not the commit date. To get the commit date of a commit use

git log -1 --format=fuller 'commit hash'

Fagan