How to search for a phrase into all git commits ?

Question

I need to search a word in all files of my repository and in all version of all files. This because I don't know when, but there is no more a piece of code in one of my file and I want to know when was deleted and recover it.

see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2928584/how-to-grep-search-committed-code-in-the-git-history — Jonathan.Brink, Sep 04 '15 at 15:29

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 04 '15 at 15:31

2

I don't know if this was what you meant, but if you want to find all commits where commit message contains given word, use

$ git log --grep=word

If you want to find all commits where "word" was added or removed in the file contents (to be more exact: where number of occurences of "word" changed), i.e. search the commit contents, use so called 'pickaxe' search with

$ git log -Sword

Good Luck :)

answered Sep 04 '15 at 15:31

Doggy-B

47
10

Thanks, I will try. The second (-S) is my necessity. – ZioBudda Sep 04 '15 at 21:35
I actually got this off another question on stackoverflow, all I did was search google for "how to grep git commits", or well, "how to search git commits" – Doggy-B Sep 07 '15 at 15:24
Anyway, I'm glad to help – Doggy-B Sep 07 '15 at 15:26

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 04 '15 at 15:27

What you're looking to do here is grep (documentation on git-grep) through the history of all revisions in the repository:

$ git grep <your_search_term> $(git rev-list --all)

Where <your_search_term> is a regex pattern.

The output will include all of the commits including your found text/expression.

How to search for a phrase into all git commits ?

2 Answers2