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I added a file to the index with:

git add somefile.txt

I then got the SHA1 for this file with:

git hash-object somefile.txt

I now have a SHA1 and I would like to retrieve the filename of the object in the index using the SHA1.

git show 5a5bf28dcd7944991944cc5076c7525439830122

This command returns the file contents but not the name of the file.

How do I get the full filename and path back from the SHA1?

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4 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

There's no such direct mapping in git as the name of the file is part of the tree object that contains the file, not of the blob object that is the file's contents.

It's not a usual operation to want to retrieve a file name from a SHA1 hash so perhaps you could expand on a real world use case for it?

If you're looking at current files (i.e. the HEAD commit) you can try the following.

git ls-tree -r HEAD | grep <SHA1>

If you want to find the contents in previous commits you'll need to do something more like this.

git rev-list <commit-list> | xargs -n1 -iX sh -c "git ls-tree -r X | grep <SHA1> && echo X"
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Thanks for that. I didn't know you could do that –  Jonathan Jan 20 '09 at 9:01
If you don't know what to put in for <commit-list>, --all will search across all branches in the repository. –  EoghanM Sep 15 '11 at 13:53
My version of git ls-tree only accepts 1 revision as argument (git v1.7.4.4). I adapted yours to for rev in $(git rev-list --all); do git ls-tree -r $rev | grep $SHA; done | uniq –  dboehmer Nov 1 '11 at 19:06
@halo: I'm fairly sure everyone's ls-tree takes a single revision argument, that's why I used -n1 with xargs. –  Charles Bailey Nov 1 '11 at 21:59
@CharlesBailey: Ah, never knew about the -n option. Seems to be very useful. Thanks for the hint! However the command as listed above didn't work for me. Don't know why but luckily solved my problem in the meantime. –  dboehmer Nov 2 '11 at 9:14
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The following shell script is heavily based on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/223678/git-which-commit-has-this-blob and the answer provided by Aristotle Pagaltzis.



# go over all trees
| while read tree commit subject ; do
     git ls-tree -r $tree | grep  "$obj_hash" \
     | while read a b hash filename ; do
        if [ "$hash" == "$obj_hash" ]; then
          echo $f
        if $f ; then break; fi
      if $f; then break; fi

I'm sure someone could beautify this script but it does work. The idea is to look at all trees commited and search for your specific hash.

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Commit the file and note the sha1 hash of the commit object. After that use

git ls-tree <commit-sha1>

and you will get the names of the files with the hashes.

Check the manual pages for more options.

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Good answer IMO! –  Rob Oct 29 '09 at 23:24
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git rev-list <commit-list> won't include any commits which were for example removed by rebase -i and now are referenced only by reflog, so if blob is not found by command above you should check also reflog ie like this:

git reflog --all | cut -d\  -f1 | xargs -n1 -iX sh -c "git ls-tree -r X | grep <BLOB_SHA> && echo X"
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