From the course: Git: Branches, Merges, and Remotes

Tree listings

From the course: Git: Branches, Merges, and Remotes

Start my 1-month free trial

Tree listings

“

- [Instructor] We know that a tree in Git is just a directory. In this movie, I want us to see how we can list the contents of that directory from inside Git. The command that we're going to be using is git and then ls-tree, followed by the tree-ish that we want it to use and to list the contents of. If you start out by asking git help for information about ls-tree, you can find out more in all the different options that are there. It tells you, List the contents of a tree object. You can see here it even mentions the word tree-ish that we just learned about. Notice also that it tells you down here that what it does, it lists the contents of a given tree object like what bin/ls -la does in the current working directory. If you're used to using UNIX or the command line on MacOS, you know this ls -a is a way to just list the contents of a directory. If you're on Windows, it's similar to typing dir. Let's type Q to get out of this and let's just try typing git ls-tree on the command line with nothing after it. It'll complain because it's looking for a tree-ish as an argument. You can see it says here the usage; git ls-tree, then there's some options we could provide, and then tree-ish, and then optionally we could provide a path as well. But that tree-ish is the important thing that we're missing. We know what tree-ish's are now, Git ls-tree, and then a space. I'm going to use HEAD. That's a convenient way to always just go to the head, the last, most recent commit of the current branch I'm on. When I type that, it comes up and it gives me a listing for that directory. It looks a little different than the listings we would get in UNIX or Windows if we were listing out a directory. You can see that it has a number of identifiers here, and it says that some of these things are blobs and some of them are trees. As you might expect, a tree is a directory. Here's a directory called assets, here's a directory called explorers, and so on. The blobs are the things that are files. Blob is kind of a funny name, but it actually means binary large object. That's where it gets its name from; binary large object. That's what it's saying. It's just saying this is some kind of a binary object, in this case, a file. It's not a tree. For example, what we're seeing is a listing of the directories at the point of the latest commit, where HEAD is pointing to. If we want to go back and look at what it was further back in time, we know how to do that now using the ancestry, and it goes back one. It may take you a second to notice that there's a difference between the list. The last commit that we made was a commit that added the tracking of this directory here, explorers. You see it's not listed here. We have explorers.html, but explorers is not listed underneath it. You can see we went back in time one and we see a different listing. You remember when we typed git ls-tree without anything after it, it also told us there was this optional path at the end? We can put a space after the tree-ish and then specify the path that we want it to look at. That lets us look further into those directories. Let me just go back. Let's look at the head. There's our listing. Now let's do the same thing but I'll put a space, and then let's type assets. I'm not going to put anything after it right now. I'm just going to type assets and hit Return. What it's showing me is a pattern matching. It's showing me all of the things in the head that match this pattern. What I want to do is I want to see the files that are inside there, and to do that, I need to put a slash at the end that says I'm not interested in this tree, I'm interested in what's inside that tree. Now it shows me that inside there are three files called images, javascripts, and stylesheets. Each of those is also a tree, and so I could keep going further down to see all of the files and directories that are in there. Ls-tree is a good way to go back and examine the state of a project at a previous moment in time to see what files and directories were there so that you can explore them further. so that you can explore them further.

Contents