GIT-LS-TREE

Section: Git Manual (1)
Updated: 09/22/2011

NAME

git-ls-tree - List the contents of a tree object

SYNOPSIS

git ls-tree [-d] [-r] [-t] [-l] [-z]
            [--name-only] [--name-status] [--full-name] [--full-tree] [--abbrev=[<n>]]
            <tree-ish> [paths...]

DESCRIPTION

Lists the contents of a given tree object, like what "/bin/ls -a" does in the current working directory. Note that:

: • the behaviour is slightly different from that of "/bin/ls" in that the paths denote just a list of patterns to match, e.g. so specifying directory name (without -r) will behave differently, and order of the arguments does not matter.

: • the behaviour is similar to that of "/bin/ls" in that the paths is taken as relative to the current working directory. E.g. when you are in a directory sub that has a directory dir, you can run git ls-tree -r HEAD dir to list the contents of the tree (that is sub/dir in HEAD). You don't want to give a tree that is not at the root level (e.g. git ls-tree -r HEAD:sub dir) in this case, as that would result in asking for sub/sub/dir in the HEAD commit. However, the current working directory can be ignored by passing --full-tree option.

OPTIONS

<tree-ish>

: Id of a tree-ish.

-d

: Show only the named tree entry itself, not its children.

-r

: Recurse into sub-trees.

-t

: Show tree entries even when going to recurse them. Has no effect if -r was not passed. -d implies -t.

-l, --long

: Show object size of blob (file) entries.

-z

: \0 line termination on output.

--name-only, --name-status

: List only filenames (instead of the "long" output), one per line.

--abbrev[=<n>]

: Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object lines, show only a partial prefix. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.

--full-name

: Instead of showing the path names relative to the current working directory, show the full path names.

--full-tree

: Do not limit the listing to the current working directory. Implies --full-name.

paths

: When paths are given, show them (note that this isn't really raw pathnames, but rather a list of patterns to match). Otherwise implicitly uses the root level of the tree as the sole path argument.

OUTPUT FORMAT

<mode> SP <type> SP <object> TAB <file>

Unless the -z option is used, TAB, LF, and backslash characters in pathnames are represented as \t, \n, and \\, respectively. This output format is compatible with what --index-info --stdin of git update-index expects.

When the -l option is used, format changes to

<mode> SP <type> SP <object> SP <object size> TAB <file>

Object size identified by <object> is given in bytes, and right-justified with minimum width of 7 characters. Object size is given only for blobs (file) entries; for other entries - character is used in place of size.

AUTHOR

Written by Petr Baudis <m[blue]pasky@suse.czm[][1]> Completely rewritten from scratch by Junio C Hamano <m[blue]gitster@pobox.comm[][2]>, another major rewrite by Linus Torvalds <m[blue]torvalds@osdl.orgm[][3]>