Information which is specific to individual lines will not be
grouped together, like revs to be marked 'ignored' or 'unblamable'. This
is more efficient, but may require more state be kept by the reader. The
`--line-porcelain` option can be used to output full commit information
for each line, allowing simpler (but less efficient) usage like:

	# count the number of lines attributed to each author
	git blame --line-porcelain file |
	sed -n 's/^author //p' |
	sort | uniq -c | sort -rn


SPECIFYING RANGES
-----------------

Unlike 'git blame' and 'git annotate' in older versions of git, the extent
of the annotation can be limited to both line ranges and revision
ranges. The `-L` option, which limits annotation to a range of lines, may be
specified multiple times.

When you are interested in finding the origin for
lines 40-60 for file `foo`, you can use the `-L` option like so
(they mean the same thing -- both ask for 21 lines starting at
line 40):

	git blame -L 40,60 foo
	git blame -L 40,+21 foo

Also you can use a regular expression to specify the line range:

	git blame -L '/^sub hello {/,/^}$/' foo

which limits the annotation to the body of the `hello` subroutine.

When you are not interested in changes older than version
v2.6.18, or changes older than 3 weeks, you can use revision
range specifiers similar to 'git rev-list':

	git blame v2.6.18.. -- foo
	git blame --since=3.weeks -- foo

When revision range specifiers are used to limit the annotation,
lines that have not changed since the range boundary (either the
commit v2.6.18 or the most recent commit that is more than 3
weeks old in the above example) are blamed for that range
boundary commit.

A particularly useful way is to see if an added file has lines
created by copy-and-paste from existing files.  Sometimes this
indicates that the developer was being sloppy and did not
refactor the code properly.  You can first find the commit that
introduced the file with:

	git log --diff-filter=A --pretty=short -- foo

and then annotate the change between the commit and its
parents, using `commit^!` notation:

	git blame -C -C -f $commit^! -- foo


INCREMENTAL OUTPUT
------------------

When called with `--incremental` option, the command outputs the
result as it is built.  The output generally will talk about
lines touched by more recent commits first (i.e. the lines will
be annotated out of order) and is meant to be used by
interactive viewers.

The output format is similar to the Porcelain format, but it
does not contain the actual lines from the file that is being
annotated.

. Each blame entry always starts with a line of:

	<40-byte-hex-sha1> <sourceline> <resultline> <num-lines>
+
Line numbers count from 1.

. The first time that a commit shows up in the stream, it has various
  other information about it printed out with a one-word tag at the
  beginning of each line describing the extra commit information (author,
  email, committer, dates, summary, etc.).

. Unlike the Porcelain format, the filename information is always
  given and terminates the entry:

	"filename" <whitespace-quoted-filename-goes-here>
+
and thus it is really quite easy to parse for some line- and word-oriented
parser (which should be quite natural for most scripting languages).
+
[NOTE]
For people who do parsing: to make it more robust, just ignore any
lines between the first and last one ("<sha1>" and "filename" lines)
where you do not recognize the tag words (or care about that particular
one) at the beginning of the "extended information" lines. That way, if
there is ever added information (like the commit encoding or extended
commit commentary), a blame viewer will not care.


MAPPING AUTHORS
---------------

See linkgit:gitmailmap[5].

CONFIGURATION
-------------

include::includes/cmd-config-section-all.adoc[]

include::config/blame.adoc[]

SEE ALSO
--------
linkgit:git-annotate[1]

GIT
---
Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite