Filter Git commits by author

Use git log --author="pattern" to filter commits by the recorded author identity. By default the pattern is a regular expression and matching is case-sensitive. It searches the commits reachable from the selected revisions, or from HEAD when no revision is given.

Filter by name or email

git log --author="John Doe"
git log --fixed-strings --author="john@example.com"

--fixed-strings treats punctuation literally. Without it, a dot in an email pattern has regular-expression meaning. A substring match is not necessarily an exact identity match; for a stricter email match, use an anchored regular expression appropriate to the author header:

git log --author='<john@example\.com>$'

These fields are commit metadata, not proof of the human who performed an action. An author can also use different names or addresses over time.

Combine filters and output formats

# One line per matching commit.
git log --author="John" --oneline

# Include file-change statistics.
git log --author="John" --stat

# Limit by recent commit timestamps.
git log --author="John" --since="2 weeks ago"

# Count matching commits reachable from HEAD.
git rev-list --count --author="John" HEAD

Date filtering is based on commit timestamps used by revision traversal, not simply on the author's displayed date. Rewritten commits can therefore appear in a recent range even when their authorship is older. --since-as-filter can be useful when you need to inspect the whole selected history without the early traversal cutoff of --since.

Count contributors in a defined history

git shortlog -sn HEAD
git shortlog -sne --all

-s shows counts, -n sorts by count, and -e includes email addresses. --all expands the revision scope to refs available in this repository; it does not fetch missing remote history. Specify HEAD for the current branch's reachable history instead.

Shortlog supports mailmap-based identity normalization. Commit counts measure recorded commits within the chosen scope, not effort or code quality, and merges or rewritten history can affect interpretation.

FAQ

How do I ignore case? Add -i, for example git log -i --author="john".

How do I include several authors? Repeat the option: git log --author="John" --author="Jane". The author patterns are alternatives. Extended regex is another option: git log --extended-regexp --author="John|Jane".

How do author and committer differ? The author identifies the original authorship recorded in the commit; the committer records who created that commit object. Cherry-pick and rebase commonly preserve authorship while changing committer metadata. Use --committer to filter the latter.

References

• Git git-log documentation
• Git git-shortlog documentation
• Git git-rev-list documentation