Git: Getting the history of a deleted file

We recently wanted to get the Git history of a file which we knew existed but had now been deleted so we could find out what had happened to it.

Using a simple git log didn’t work:

git log deletedFile.txt
fatal: ambiguous argument 'deletedFile.txt': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

We eventually came across Francois Marier’s blog post which points out that you need to use the following command instead:

git log -- deletedFile.txt

I’ve tried reading through the man page but I’m still not entirely sure what the distinction between using – and not using it is supposed to be.

If someone could explain it that’d be cool…

From http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2011/10/04/git-getting-the-history-of-a-deleted-file