git show

Commit, tree, tag, blob — show what's inside.

🎯 What & why

Print one or more objects in a human-readable form. For commits: metadata + diff. For trees: like ls-tree. For tags: the tag plus the commit it points to. For blobs: the file contents.

🧠 Mental model

show is cat-file -p with formatting layered on top. It dispatches on object type. The diff for a commit is diff <parent> <commit> under the hood.

🛠️ Synopsis

git show [<options>] <object>...

🎚️ Switches & options

Flag	What it does
`--stat`	File-summary instead of full diff.
`--name-only`	Just the changed file names.
`--pretty=<format>`	Customize the metadata header (`oneline`, `short`, `medium`, `full`, `format:%h %s` etc.).
`-s`	Suppress the diff. Just show the metadata.
`--word-diff`	Word-level diff.

💡 Use cases

Quickly inspect what one commit changed.
Cat a file from any historical commit (<rev>:<path>).
Read the message of any commit without scrolling log.

🧪 Examples

Show the most recent commit.

$ git show

Show a tree at a specific commit.

$ git show HEAD:src/

Show one file at a specific commit.

$ git show v1.2:Makefile

Just the message for a commit.

$ git show -s --format=%B HEAD~3

🎓 Recommendations

git show <ref>:<path> is faster to type than git checkout <ref> -- <path> && cat <path> && git restore <path> and doesn't dirty anything.
For repeated 'show me the diff of just this commit', show <sha> is the cleanest answer.

🪤 Common pitfalls

On a merge commit, show defaults to a 'combined diff' — not the diff against either parent. Add -m to see per-parent diffs.
show of a tag shows the tag object, not the commit it points to, unless you dereference (tag^{commit}).

🔗 Related modules

📝 Quiz

Hit each option, then Check answers. Score is recorded; Next is always open.