DESCRIPTION
-----------
-Many git Porcelainish commands take mixture of flags
+Many git porcelainish commands take mixture of flags
(i.e. parameters that begin with a dash '-') and parameters
meant for underlying `git-rev-list` command they use internally
and flags and parameters for other commands they use as the
--short, --short=number::
Instead of outputting the full SHA1 values of object names try to
- abbriviate them to a shorter unique name. When no length is specified
+ abbreviate them to a shorter unique name. When no length is specified
7 is used. The minimum length is 4.
--since=datestring, --after=datestring::
'rev{caret}0' means the commit itself and is used when 'rev' is the
object name of a tag object that refers to a commit object.
-* A suffix '~<n>' to a revision parameter means the commit
+* A suffix '{tilde}<n>' to a revision parameter means the commit
object that is the <n>th generation grand-parent of the named
commit object, following only the first parent. I.e. rev~3 is
equivalent to rev{caret}{caret}{caret} which is equivalent to\
and dereference the tag recursively until a non-tag object is
found.
-'git-rev-parse' also accepts a prefix '{caret}' to revision parameter,
-which is passed to 'git-rev-list'. Two revision parameters
-concatenated with '..' is a short-hand for writing a range
-between them. I.e. 'r1..r2' is equivalent to saying '{caret}r1 r2'
-
Here is an illustration, by Jon Loeliger. Both node B and C are
a commit parents of commit node A. Parent commits are ordered
left-to-right.
G H I J
\ / \ /
D E F
- \ | /
- \ | /
- \|/
+ \ | / \
+ \ | / |
+ \|/ |
B C
\ /
\ /
J = F^2 = B^3^2 = A^^3^2
+SPECIFYING RANGES
+-----------------
+
+History traversing commands such as `git-log` operate on a set
+of commits, not just a single commit. To these commands,
+specifying a single revision with the notation described in the
+previous section means the set of commits reachable from that
+commit, following the commit ancestry chain.
+
+To exclude commits reachable from a commit, a prefix `{caret}`
+notation is used. E.g. "`{caret}r1 r2`" means commits reachable
+from `r2` but exclude the ones reachable from `r1`.
+
+This set operation appears so often that there is a shorthand
+for it. "`r1..r2`" is equivalent to "`{caret}r1 r2`". It is
+the difference of two sets (subtract the set of commits
+reachable from `r1` from the set of commits reachable from
+`r2`).
+
+A similar notation "`r1\...r2`" is called symmetric difference
+of `r1` and `r2` and is defined as
+"`r1 r2 --not $(git-merge-base --all r1 r2)`".
+It it the set of commits that are reachable from either one of
+`r1` or `r2` but not from both.
+
+Here are a few examples:
+
+ D A B D
+ D F A B C D F
+ ^A G B D
+ ^A F B C F
+ G...I C D F G I
+ ^B G I C D F G I
+
Author
------
Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> and