How to Identify Outdated Files in a Git Repository
· 9 min read
Scenario
When maintaining a Git repository, particularly one for documentation, it is common to have files that haven't been updated in a while. To address this issue, you can link a section or sentence in the document to the corresponding code or an existing issue, so that the document can be updated when the code changes or the issue is resolved. This is useful when starting a new project, but it can be difficult to maintain these links for an existing large project.
To identify potential outdated files, you can use the git log command to retrieve the last commit log of each file and find long-term inactive files. The following sections describe how to generate a last commit report for a repository and how to write the script step by step.