The git log
command can tell you all the commits that touched a file. That
can be narrowed down to the latest commit for that file with the -1
flag. The
commit that it reports can then be further formatted to with the --format
flag.
The %ai
format pattern gives the date the commit was authored in an ISO
8601-like format. The %aI
(capital I
) gives the date the commit was
authored strictly in the ISO 8601 format.
Here are examples of both side by side:
❯ git log -1 --format=%ai -- README.md
2024-10-15 13:59:09 -0500
❯ git log -1 --format=%aI -- README.md
2024-10-15T13:59:09-05:00
I made use of this in a script where I needed to get an idea of when various files were most recently modified.
See man git-log
and the PRETTY FORMATS
section for more details.