git file-history

This script provides a Git subcommand to retrieve commit history for a particular file in a repository. This is particularly useful for preserving the commit history of a file when moving it to another repository. To generate a patch file, pipe the output to a .patch file. Otherwise the output is displayed using Git's default pager.

Installation

Put the git-file-history file anywhere in your path. That's it!

Example

Say you have a repository of recipes and you want to move the section for greens to its own separate repository, while preserving full authorship information.

cd ~/recipes
git file-history greens/salad.txt > ~/salad.patch
mkdir ~/leafy-recipes && cd ~/leafy-recipes
git init
git am --committer-date-is-author-date < ~/salad.patch