How to identify large commits in git history

This shell script displays all blob objects in the repository, sorted from smallest to largest.

For my sample repo, it ran about 100 times faster than the other ones found here.
On my trusty Athlon II X4 system, it handles the Linux Kernel repository with its 5.6 million objects in just over a minute.

The Base Script

git rev-list --objects --all |
  git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize) %(rest)' |
  sed -n 's/^blob //p' |
  sort --numeric-sort --key=2 |
  cut -c 1-12,41- |
  $(command -v gnumfmt || echo numfmt) --field=2 --to=iec-i --suffix=B --padding=7 --round=nearest

When you run above code, you will get nice human-readable output like this:

...
0d99bb931299  530KiB path/to/some-image.jpg
2ba44098e28f   12MiB path/to/hires-image.png
bd1741ddce0d   63MiB path/to/some-video-1080p.mp4

macOS users: Since numfmt is not available on macOS, you can either omit the last line and deal with raw byte sizes or brew install coreutils.

Filtering

To achieve further filtering, insert any of the following lines before the sort line.

To exclude files that are present in HEAD, insert the following line:

grep -vF --file=<(git ls-tree -r HEAD | awk '{print $3}') |

To show only files exceeding given size (e.g. 1 MiB = 2²⁰ B), insert the following line:

awk '$2 >= 2^20' |

Output for Computers

To generate output that’s more suitable for further processing by computers, omit the last two lines of the base script. They do all the formatting. This will leave you with something like this:

...
0d99bb93129939b72069df14af0d0dbda7eb6dba 542455 path/to/some-image.jpg
2ba44098e28f8f66bac5e21210c2774085d2319b 12446815 path/to/hires-image.png
bd1741ddce0d07b72ccf69ed281e09bf8a2d0b2f 65183843 path/to/some-video-1080p.mp4