View the change history of a file using Git versioning

For a graphical view I'd use gitk:

gitk [filename]

Or to follow filename past renames:

gitk --follow [filename]

You can use

git log -p filename

to let Git generate the patches for each log entry.

See

git help log

for more options - it can actually do a lot of nice things :) To get just the diff for a specific commit you can

git show HEAD

or any other revision by identifier. Or use

gitk

to browse the changes visually.

git log --follow -p -- path-to-file

This will show the entire history of the file (including history beyond renames and with diffs for each change).

In other words, if the file named bar was once named foo, then git log -p bar (without the --follow option) will only show the file's history up to the point where it was renamed -- it won't show the file's history when it was known as foo. Using git log --follow -p bar will show the file's entire history, including any changes to the file when it was known as foo. The -p option ensures that diffs are included for each change.