searching for some content in a file accross multiple revisions

Question

I would like to do the following using svn: Search in a file for a certain string content across the revision history? Is this possible>? How do I best go about it? Do I come up with a script using svn cat -r1 and grep or is there some better method?

Answer 1

Svn has no direct support for this.

If it's only one file this will work, albeit slowly.

svn log -q <file> | grep '^r' | awk '{print $1;}' | \
  xargs -n 1 -i svn cat -r {} <file> | grep '<string>'

Fill in <file> and <string> A for loop will also work so you can print the matching file/revision if desired.

Using a for loop to have some more output control (this is bash):

#!/bin/env bash
f=$1
s=$2
for r in $(svn log -q "$f" | grep '^r' | awk '{print $1;}'); do
  e=$(svn cat -r $r "$f" | grep "$s")
  if [[ -n "$e" ]]; then
    echo "Found in revision $r: $e"
  fi
done

This takes two arguments: the (path to) the file to search and the string to search for in the file.