How to show all files git knows about?

Question

How can I produce a list of filenames (incl. paths) that git knows about over the course of the whole history?

Answer 1

Naive solution:

git rev-list --all | xargs -n1 git ls-tree --full-name -r --name-only  | sort -u

This lists all commits, then uses that to list all files in every commit. sort deduplicates. Only works for small-ish repos though as it takes a long time.

A better solution would be to use libgit2 to do the same, should be faster but requires some programming. A quick hack that implements this can be found on github. It uses pygit2 and is an order of magnitude faster than the shell pipeline above.