examining history of deleted file

Question

If I delete a file in Subversion, how can I look at it's history and contents? If I try to do svn cat or svn log on a nonexistent file, it complains that the file doesn't exist.

Also, if I wanted to resurrect the file, should I just svn add it back?

(I asked specifically about Subversion, but I'd also like to hear about how Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git handle this case, too.)

Solution 1

To get the log of a deleted file, use

svn log -r lastrevisionthefileexisted

If you want to resurrect the file and keep its version history, use

svn copy url/of/file@lastrevisionthefileexisted -r lastrevisionthefileexisted path/to/workingcopy/file

If you just want the file content but unversioned (e.g., for a quick inspection), use

svn cat url/of/file@lastrevisionthefileexisted -r latrevisionthefileexisted > file

In any case, DO NOT use 'svn up' to get a deleted file back!

Solution 2

When you want to look at old files you really should know the difference between:

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file -r 1234

and

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@1234

The first version looks at the path that is now available as http://server/svn/project/file and retrieves that file as it was in revision 1234. (So this syntax does not work after a file delete).

The second syntax gets the file that was available as http://server/svn/project/file in revision 1234. So this syntax DOES work on deleted files.

You can even combine these methods to retrieve a file that was available in revision 2345 as http://server/svn/project/file but with the contents as it had in 1234 with:

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@2345 -r 1234

Solution 3

First, find the revision number where the file got deleted:

svn log -v > log.txt

Then look in log.txt (not an SVN guru, so I don't know a better way) for a line with

D <deleted file>

and see which revision that was. Then, as in the other answers, resurrect the file using the previous revision.

Solution 4

It's nothing particularly special in git. If you know the name of the file, you can find out the change that removed it with log:

git log -n 1 -- filename

Then you can use that commit to get the file as it existed before the deletion.

git checkout [last_revision]^ filename

Example:

dhcp-120:/tmp/slosh 587% ls -l slosh.tac
ls: slosh.tac: No such file or directory
dhcp-120:/tmp/slosh 588% git log -n 1 -- slosh.tac
commit 8d4a1f1a94e4aa37c1cb9d329a140d08eec1b587
Author: Dustin Sallings <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Dec 15 11:25:00 2008 -0800

    Get rid of a .conf and replace it with .tac.
dhcp-120:/tmp/slosh 589% git checkout 8d4a1f^ slosh.tac
dhcp-120:/tmp/slosh 590% ll slosh.tac
-rw-------  1 dustin  wheel  822 Dec 30 12:52 slosh.tac

Note that this does not actually put the file back in revision control. It simply drops the file as it existed in its final state into the current location. You can then add it or just inspect it or whatever from that point.

Solution 5

A solution using only the GUI:

If you know the name of the file, but don't know its last revision number or even its path:

1. From Repo Browser do a "Show log" on the root
2. Hit "Show All" (at the bottom of the log dialog)
3. Type the filename into the Filter textbox (at the top of the log dialog)

This will then show only those revisions where the file was added/modified/deleted. This is your history of the file.

Note that if the file was deleted by deleting one of its parent folders, it won't have a 'deleted' entry in the log (and so mjy's solution won't work). In this case, its most recent entry in the filtered log will correspond to its contents at deletion.

View more solutions

Comments

[rmeador]

You can also ressurrect the file by doing a reverse merge of the revision in which you deleted it. This is the procedure recommended in the SVN docs. As for using "svn up", it's not so much a matter of "don't do it" as it is "it will not do what you want it to do".

[Benjamin Peterson]

How can I see the file's whole history, though?

[rmeador]

I'd edit the answer if I could, but since I can't, the way to get the whole log is to use a revision range of the form 1:lastrevisionfileexisted (or perhaps it starts at zero... can't remember)

[abatishchev]

svn log -v | grep D "file.name"

[Dustin]

Ah, very true. I used to do that the really, really hard way. :)

[Wayne E. Seguin]

This gives an error. Example: svn log -r 37428 svn.example.com/deletedfile.java svn: '/!svn/bc/98571/deletedfile.java' path not found

[Stefan]

Simple: show the log for a parent folder with the '-v' switch: you'll get for every entry a list of changed paths. Find the one with a 'D' in front and the name of your deleted file. That's the revision where the file got deleted.

[Jack M.]

Are you sure it existed at that revision? You have to specify a revision where the file actually existed.

[Keith Palmer Jr.]

Gah, thanks! The current top response in this thread does not mention this, this is great!

[Keith Palmer Jr.]

This doesn't seem to work for deleted files. If I try this, I get this error message: svn cat [url]/trunk/include/syeka/poster_funk.incl.php -r 50 > out.txt svn: '/admintools/!svn/bc/131/trunk/include/syeka/poster_funk.inc‌​l.php' path not found See @Bert Huijben's response further down this thread for a working solution.

[Cerin]

+1 for being the first person to correctly answer the question. You can't look at the contents if you don't know the revision before it was deleted.

[dubek]

See the answer by Bert Huijben for the weird different between -r37428 and adding @37428 to the SVN URL.

[tchen]

@abatishchev this obtains the list of deleted files, but discards the revision info, so it's not useful. Also it's slow if you're working with a large/old repository with much change history.

[Mars]

Brute force is not always the shit. Especially not on big repos.

[Mars]

Good, great with @abatishchev's improvement. tchen: easily fixed using a -B50 or so argument to grep, see my answer.

[Mir]

+1 for a UI only solution. Command line is great, and all, but it's not always the best answer without exception. Especially when you're working in an environment you don't control, and don't have easy command line access to SVN.

[Derrick Rice]

This still failed for me unless I used absolute paths, since my local svn client was giving an error when unable to resolve ./local/file when the ./local directory did not exist. This might not be a problem for newer versions of SVN.

[musiphil]

@DerrickRice: In that case, the ^ notation comes handy: it refers to the repository root, so you can say svn cat ^/local/file@REV (depending on the distance between the repository root and URL).

[mindmatters]

Another good way to limit the svn log -v output for very large/old repositories is the -l option. So you could use svn log -v -l 100 | grep D "file.name"

[Barney]

This works great in principle. For folders I receive the following: svn: E200009: Could not cat all targets because some targets are directories

[Felipe Alvarez]

This is the best answer. Has the highest votes, too.

[wytten]

This is the answer you are looking for. Not sure how the accepted answer achieved that many votes or got accepted because it doesn't work as far as I can tell.

[thinsoldier]

svn log --search _test2.php -v ... svn: invalid option: --search ... :(

[cedd]

What does the -B50 do? I can get a list of files using svn log and grep quite easily using the tips here, but I can't seem to get the revision numbers displayed at all easily, being as they are displayed on a different line. I tried the B50 thing and it didn't seem to work that amazingly for me.

[cedd]

It outputs the mathced line and the 50 lines above that in case anybody else is reading this.

[Jon Watte]

If I have a repo with 100,000 commits, "lastrevisionthefileexisted" is not easy to find!

[Kevin]

for rev in {900..600}; do if svn cat server/repo/file.ext@$rev > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo "Last seen at revision: $rev"; break; fi; done

[inquam]

If you know the name of the file, or part of it, but don't remember when you deleted it you could use this quick script I threw together a few years back: github.com/inquam/svn-find-deleted-file

[JohnK]

Wonderful answer. Only problem is that the question is about svn!

[Georg Muehlenberg]

Please note that the above answer is meant for the TortoiseSVN GUI.

[Arseni Mourzenko]

As the post makes no attempt to answer the original question which is explicitly about Subversion, consider downvoting it in order to give it a chance to be removed.