Navigate a file's history

To go back in time through a file's commit history in Git, you can use git log and git checkout commands. Here's the concise process:

  1. View the file's commit history:
  1. Check out a specific previous version:

git checkout <commit> -- <path>

Restores a file or directory to its state from a specific commit.

Or to see the contents without checking out:

git show <commit>:<path>

Display the contents of a file as it existed in a specified commit.

To restore to the previous version of the file:

git checkout HEAD <path>

Restore a file from the most recent commit

You can also use git blame to see line-by-line commit history:

git blame <path>

Show who last changed each line of a file and in which commit.

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