examining history of deleted file
If I delete a file in Subversion, how can I look at it's history and contents? If I try to do svn cat or svn log on a nonexistent file, it complains that the file doesn't exist.
Also, if I wanted to resurrect the file, should I just svn add it back?
(I asked specifically about Subversion, but I'd also like to hear about how Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git handle this case, too.)
Answer
When you want to look at old files you really should know the difference between:
svn cat http://server/svn/project/file -r 1234
and
svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@1234
The first version looks at the path that is now available as http://server/svn/project/file and retrieves that file as it was in revision 1234. (So this syntax does not work after a file delete).
The second syntax gets the file that was available as http://server/svn/project/file in revision 1234. So this syntax DOES work on deleted files.
You can even combine these methods to retrieve a file that was available in revision 2345 as http://server/svn/project/file but with the contents as it had in 1234 with:
svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@2345 -r 1234