I recently received a modification of a file of mine that I put under revision control, but I cannot spot on which commit this modified file is based.
So, is there a way to determine which commit modifying a given file is the least different to an edited version?
I don't know of any magical way of checking this but you might want to try this:
git diff --stat HEAD..HEAD~10 -- myfile.cpp and manually change the HEAD~10
It will tell you how many difference there are between the revisions.
You can automate this using:
for i in {1..5}; do echo "HEAD~$i"; git diff --stat HEAD~$i..HEAD CMakeLists.txt ; done 
git-diff --stat to grep myfile.cpp | gawk ' { print $3 } ' to reduce that to the amount of changes. I guess together with that for loop one can then use sort to obtain the best candidates and review their diffs manuallygit log --stat myfile.cpp, and again with some smart gawking the output might be formatted into something like "commitid howManyChanges" ( I don't know enough about awk though)git log --numstat --oneline -- myfile.cpp gives a nice and brief output (ok, enough comments added...)