Getting useful information out of git log

A couple of weeks ago, this snippet was hitting the software twitterati in a big way

git log --graph --pretty=format:'%an: %s - %Cred%h%Creset %C(yellow)%d%Creset %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

It produces a very pretty tree view of the git log, piped into less.

It got me wondering what you could do with git log in terms of viewing the total number of commits by each author working on a repository. A league table of commits, if you will - although that isn't a metric of competition or status in any way. :)

Here's what I came up with:

git log | grep 'Author:'| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Here's the output of that command on the github rails project (abridged)

3045 Author: David Heinemeier Hansson <david@loudthinking.com>
2647 Author: Jeremy Kemper <jeremy@bitsweat.net>
 732 Author: Joshua Peek <josh@joshpeek.com>
 519 Author: Michael Koziarski <michael@koziarski.com>
 425 Author: Rick Olson <technoweenie@gmail.com>
 346 Author: Jamis Buck <jamis@37signals.com>
 345 Author: Pratik Naik <pratiknaik@gmail.com>
 301 Author: Marcel Molina <marcel@vernix.org>
 267 Author: José Valim <jose.valim@gmail.com>
 231 Author: Nicholas Seckar <nseckar@gmail.com>
 181 Author: Emilio Tagua <miloops@gmail.com>
 179 Author: Yehuda Katz + Carl Lerche <ykatz+clerche@engineyard.com>
 178 Author: Yehuda Katz <wycats@gmail.com>