git log is one of the most powerful and yet most underused inspection tools in Git. While many developers use it only to view basic commit history, it can be turned into a highly flexible data-extraction and data-generation tool. With the right flags and formatting options, git log becomes not just a history viewer, but an element of data pipeline for debugging, analytics and automation.
Below are several advanced usage patterns that go well beyond the default experience.
Structured output with --pretty=format:
One of the most powerful features is using --pretty=format: to control exactly how commit data is printed. This is especially useful when you want to process git log output further with some scripts. Instead of nice-looking and human-readable logs, you can output records that are easy to parse:
git log --pretty=format:"%H|%an|%ad|%s" --date=iso
