I wanted to get an idea of all the TIL posts I wrote during 2024. Every TIL I write is under version control in a git repo on github. That means git has all the info I need to figure that out.
The git diff
command is a good way at this problem. With the
--diff-filter=A
flag I can restrict the results to just files that were
Added. And with --name-only
I can cut all the other diff details out and
get just filenames.
But filenames added to which commits? We need to specify a ref range. There is a ton of flexibility in how you define a ref, including a date specification suffix that points to the value of the ref at an earlier point in time.
So, how about from the beginning of 2024 to the beginning of 2025:
HEAD@{2024-01-01}..HEAD@{2025-01-01}
Putting that all together, we this command and potentially a big list of files.
$ git diff --diff-filter=A --name-only HEAD@{2024-01-01}..HEAD@{2025-01-01}
I wanted to restrict the results to just markdown files, so I added a filename pattern.
$ git diff --diff-filter=A --name-only HEAD@{2024-01-01}..HEAD@{2025-01-01} -- "*.md"
I could even go a step further to see only the files added to a specific directory.
$ git diff --diff-filter=A --name-only HEAD@{2024-01-01}..HEAD@{2025-01-01} -- "postgres/*.md"
As a final bonus, I can spit out the github URLs for all those files with a bit of awk
.
$ git diff --diff-filter=A --name-only HEAD@{2024-01-01}..HEAD@{2025-01-01} -- "postgres/*.md" |
awk '{print "https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/" $0}'