git-retouch
Reset timestamps in a Git working tree to match the last time files were touched by commits
What it does
This script imbues Git with a retouch command. From within any Git checkout,
you can run:
git retouch
and the files in your checkout will have their timestamps set to the most recent time that a Git commit made changes to them.
Why would anyone want that?
Git purists will tell you that timestamps don't matter in Git because Git itself doesn't store information about timestamps on files. The times that commits were made are all that matters.
They are correct to a point. But sometimes it is useful to know the relative
ages of files in a particular Git checkout. And to my knowledge, after all
these years, Git still doesn't provide anything nearly as useful as a good old
ls -lt or dir /o:-d from the command line.
git-retouch makes that possible.
How to install
First, make sure you have Ruby. (Sorry for the inconvenience, Perl and Python fans, but take heart: I do consider this to be a bug, and I hope to port this to Perl in the future so that it will work out-of-the-box with any Git installation.)
Next, simply put the git-retouch script anywhere on your path so Git can find
it. Take care to rename it to git-retouch without the file extension, or at
least to make a link named git-retouch without the extension.
Public domain
I, Lawrence Leonard Gilbert, dedicate this work to the public domain.