Getting the file that was deleted long time ago in git

Question

I have a project with a lot of subdirs, and somewhere in there in some deep subdir there was a file called foo.py. Couple years ago it was deleted, the delete was committed and pushed. How can I see the contents of foo.py as it existed right before the deletion?

Answer 1

If you know the full path to the file, you can use git log to find the last commit in which it existed:

git log -1 -- path/to/foo.py

This will return something like:

commit 6b6df3bf2aed05b4ed63a9c99a1e61c7b3059aa6
Author: you
Date:   Thu Jul 2 17:56:30 2015 +0900

    Delete foo.py

You could then...

...check out the parent of that commit and inspect the file:

git checkout 6b6df3bf2aed05b4ed63a9c99a1e61c7b3059aa6^
cat path/to/foo.py

...or use git show to display it on stdout:

git show 6b6df3bf2aed05b4ed63a9c99a1e61c7b3059aa6^:path/to/foo.py