History of an individual file

Text mode

git log -p <filename>

Graphically

gitk <filename>

Find revision by date

This is kind of obtuse, and I really recommend git log or gitk . If you insist:

git rev-list -n 1 --before="2009-07-27 13:37" master

This finds one revision (-n 1) before a certain date. You can use this with git checkout (see below).

Check out old version of a file

Find the old revision by using git log (see above).

git checkout <revision> <file>

Reverting to the current version (HEAD):

git checkout HEAD <file>

Set file modifcation times to last commit

Here's a little script​ to walk through git log output, find the commit times for each file and call touch on them. Call it from the root of the checked out repository. git and touch need to be in your path. I was able to set times on the abac git repository by:

$ cd abac
$ python ../git-touch.py

No warranty. As is.