Recently I came across a blog post explaining how to get the history of a deleted file: https://dzone.com/articles/git-getting-history-deleted, which pointed to yet another blog with the simple solution https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/querying-deleted-content-in-git/: git log -- deleted_file.txt However, neither explained exactly why this works, and I got interested. -- is normally the convention that means “pass everything after this into the program as a literal string. For example, if for some crazy reason you had a file named -h (which is perfectly legal), rm -h would just bring up the man page, while rm -- -h would work as expected (as would rm .