xaw.txt

Browsing Git
Git also gives you access to a number of lower level tools that can be used to browse the repository,
inspect the status and contents of any of the objects,
and are generally helpful for inspection and debugging.
Showing Objects
The git show command is really useful for presenting any of the objects in a very human readable format.
Running this command on a file will simply output the contents of the file.
Running it on a tree will just give you the filenames of the contents of that tree,
but none of its subtrees.
Where it’s most useful is using it to look at commits.
showing commits
If you call it on a tree-ish that is a commit object,
you will get simple information about the commit
(the author, message, date, etc)
and a diff of what changed between that commit and its parents.
showing trees
Instead of the git show command,
it’s generally more useful to use the lower level git ls-tree command to view trees,
because it gives you the SHA-1s of all the blobs and trees that it points to.
You can also run this command recursively,
so you can see all the subtrees as well.
This is a great way to get the SHA-1 of any blob anywhere in the tree without having to walk it one node at a time.
The -t makes it also show the SHA-1s of the subtrees themselves,
rather than just all the blobs.
showing blobs
Lastly, you may want to extract the contents of individual blobs.
The cat-file command is an easy way to do that,
and can also serve to let you know what type of object a SHA-1 is,
if you don’t know.
It is sort of a catch-all command that you can use to inspect objects.
With those basic commands, you should be able to explore and inspect any object in any git repository relatively easily.
git object browsing screencast
In this screencast, we show how to browse and inspect raw Git objects.
The major tools covered are the git cat-file and git ls-tree commands to inspect the object contents,
and then we cover some of the included graphical browsers, gitk and gitweb.