get-date-of-first-commit.md

Find the creation date of a file in a repository

To retrieve a list of dates on which a file has been committed to git, use git log with a specific format that outputs the committer date only. For example, %cs outputs the committer date in short format (YYYY-MM-DD). See pretty-formats for more options.

git log --pretty='format:%cs' <filename> | tail -1

git log outputs a list of committer dates, sorted from recent commits to less recent commits. Grab the creation date by using the tail command.