git-ls-tree

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> [<path>…]

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 <path> denotes 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 <path> 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-z: \0 line termination on output and do not quote filenames. See OUTPUT FORMAT below for more information.
--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 the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. 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.
[<path>…]: 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>

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.

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see git-config[1]). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.