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Use git rev-list to find commits in a chosen seven-day window that touched a file, then use git diff to compare that file at two selected revisions. These are separate operations: the date filter finds commits; it does not automatically choose snapshots from the exact start and end of the week.
What the two commands do
git rev-list walks commit ancestry from a starting revision. Git describes it as listing commits reachable by following parent links, while excluding commits reachable from any revisions prefixed with ^. Date options and a path can narrow the walk. Git’s rev-list options documentation describes these controls.
git diff, by contrast, compares two endpoints—such as commits, trees, or blobs. It shows the difference between the selected states, not a list of every commit in a date range. See Git’s git-diff documentation.
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Before running a command, choose the starting ref and the time interval. The example below searches from HEAD and uses UTC timestamps. Its boundaries represent the interval from 2026-09-30 00:00 UTC up to 2026-10-07 00:00 UTC. Replace them with the dates and timezone that fit your question.
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- Choose the date basis. Git’s date filters select commits by date. If your question is about who authored a change versus when it entered the repository, check the author-date and committer-date filtering options in the rev-list options manual; those dates are not interchangeable.
- Choose the boundaries. Git documents
--since/--afteras selecting commits newer than a date and--until/--beforeas selecting commits older than a date. If a commit exactly on a boundary matters, verify how the chosen dates and Git version treat it rather than assuming that the interval is inclusive. The special date valuetodaymeans the last midnight, which may not match a rolling seven-day window. - Choose the history scope.
HEADsearches commits reachable from the current checkout. Other refs or range exclusions change which commits are reachable, especially in merge-heavy histories.
Find commits in the window that touched the file
Run this from within the repository, replacing the illustrative timestamps and path with your own:
git rev-list --since='2026-09-30 00:00:00 +0000'
--until='2026-10-07 00:00:00 +0000' HEAD -- path/to/data-fileThe path after -- limits the history walk to commits that touched that path. The separator distinguishes the path from revision and option arguments. Git’s git-rev-list 2.33.1 documentation shows path-limited history examples.
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The command prints commit IDs, normally newest first. It does not print the file contents or the changes themselves. To inspect a selected commit’s details, use its ID with commands such as git show, or compare it with another revision using git diff.
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Compare the file at two selected revisions
After reviewing the commit list, choose the older and newer revisions that answer your question, then run:
git diff <older-commit> <newer-commit> -- path/to/data-fileThis reports the net difference in that file between those two snapshots. It does not tell you every intermediate edit: a later change may undo an earlier one, leaving little or no net difference. If chronology matters, inspect the matching commits individually or compare successive revisions.
Match the command to the question
- “Which commits touched this file during the week?” Use the date-limited
git rev-listcommand and inspect its returned commits. - “What is the net change between two revisions?” Use
git diffwith those revisions and the file path. - “What changed exactly at the calendar-week edges?” Identify the snapshots immediately before and after the desired boundaries, then diff those endpoints. A commit filter alone does not select the precise boundary snapshots.
- “What happened in order?” Review the matching commits chronologically and examine each change; one endpoint diff cannot reconstruct the sequence.
When ordinary date filtering is not enough
Git documents --since-as-filter=<date> as visiting all commits in the specified range rather than stopping the walk at the first commit older than the date. It can matter when you need every matching commit in a range. It is not a universal substitute for other history-walk settings, so choose it according to the refs, history shape, and question you are investigating. Consult the rev-list options documentation for the option’s behavior.
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Common sources of misleading results
- Assuming the filtered commits are the endpoints: the first and last commits returned may fall inside the interval; neither necessarily represents the file exactly at the interval’s start or end.
- Ignoring the starting ref: a walk from
HEADcovers commits reachable from that checkout, not necessarily every branch or every commit in the repository. - Treating a path filter as a snapshot query: it selects history associated with a path; it does not retrieve the file’s state at an arbitrary timestamp.
- Confusing authorship and integration time: author and committer dates answer different questions, so select the relevant date meaning deliberately.
- Expecting an endpoint diff to show the full timeline: it captures only the net state difference between its two chosen endpoints.
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