How to get all the renames in a folder's history?

I will use git filter-repo to extract a folder and its history from a repository.

Its documentation says,

> Note that much like git itself, renames are NOT followed so you may need to specify multiple paths, e.g. --path olddir/ --path newdir/

That's saying that I should to specify explicitly the previous names of files outside the folder, so that their history is retained too.

Is there a convenient way to get the old names of all files in a folder?

The help for git log --follow says, "(works only for a single file)" -- so an algorithm might be:

• For each file in folder
  • Run git log --follow
  • Parse the git log output to look for any renaming in the history

I suppose I can do that -- i.e. write a script to issue git log --follow commands for each file, and parse the output -- is this the best or only way?

Most efficient is probably postprocess git log --oneline --name-status --diff-filter=R,

Add -m --graph to get a better grip on what you're looking at if needed, it'll show the entire merge history of the renames, that can get voluminous but if you need it you need it. I don't know of any 3d history visualisation tools, that'd be handy.

Anyway, a starter kit on the postprocessing, this runs rather dramatically faster than git filter-repo --analyze on large histories:

git log --reverse -m --first-parent --name-status --pretty= --diff-filter=R \
        | awk '{ kids[$2]=kids[$2]"\n\t->\t"$3} 
            END{ for (k in kids) print k,kids[k] }' FS=$'\t' OFS=$'\t'

There is an alternative way apart from "git log --follow" to get the old names of all files in a folder using Git, it requires using the "git blame" command. The git blame command can be used to view the entire history of a file, including renames and other changes, in a format that shows the line-by-line changes to the file.

Refer below example for how you can use the git blame command to get the old names of all files in a folder:

git ls-tree -r --name-only HEAD | while read filename; do git blame --line-porcelain $filename | grep "^filename "; done | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

In the above example, the git ls-tree command is used to list the contents of the repository, and the while loop iterates through each file in the folder. The git blame command is then used to view the history of each file, and the output is filtered to show only the file names using the grep command. The final output is sorted and processed using the sort and uniq commands to show a list of all the old names of the files in the folder, along with the number of times each file name has appeared in the history of the repository.

Thanks.

Running git filter-repo --analyze produces various files including renames.txt.

It's not filtered per-path, it's for the whole repository.

You can parse it to find/filter whatever folders interest you.