How to check when a file was deleted in Git

The git log command lists all of the commits in the repository’s history.

Syntax

git log [<options>]

The options relevant to this Answer are as follows:

• --full-history: This flag tells Git not to hide out (or prune) any history associated with the file. In other words, history simplification will not be done.

We use the git log command with the --full-history option to find out when a file was deleted.

The command is as follows:

git log --full-history -- file_name

The command above lists all the commits (including merge commits) that touched file_name. The last (top) commit is the one that deleted the file.

For example, consider the file test.txt. Let’s insert this file name in the above command:

git log --full-history -- test.txt

This will give the following output.

commit <commit-id>
Author: Arthur Chang 
Date:   Sat Jan 15 15:15:15 2020 +0012

    Deleted test.txt

commit <commit-id>
Author: Arthur Chang
Date:   Sat Jan 18 17:18:19 2020 +0012

    Added test.txt

Here, the first (that is, the top) commit date is the date when the file test.txt was deleted.