SVN log messages in reverse order

Question

I'm trying to look at svn commit messages, but because the order is reversed I don't know which revision is last nor which revision I want to look at.

My question is how do you show the log from the last revision to say 50 revisions before that? There are certainly ways of figuring out the last revision; I'm just looking for a single command that makes it easy.

Thanks

Answer 1

Use svn log

Show revisions 5-20, starting with 5:

$ svn log -r 5:20 file.txt

Reverse the order:

$ svn log -r 20:5 file.txt

You can also show by date -- show revisions for Jan - Mar 2010

$ svn log -r {20100101}:{20100331} file.txt

Read more in the docs for svn log and more specifics about specifying revisions for log, diff, co, etc

Answer 2

On a branch where you don't want the entire log history you can use:

svn log -r1:HEAD --stop-on-copy <svn path>

This will give you the first commit on that branch at the top of your results and you can do a --limit 1 to just return that log message.