Re: Searching all git objects

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jun 25, 2008, 23:17 UTC
Message-ID: <20080625231742.GT11793@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <E99352BE-5C43-437E-A5E6-622BEEA03DFA@comcast.net>

"Sam G." <ceptorial@comcast.net> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> We recently had a developer make a large commit (mostly centered  
> around one file) which she believed she properly pushed to a remote  
> repository last week, but looking at both her repository and the  
> remote repository, that commit is now nowhere to be found. If somehow  
> the master branch she was working on in her repository has lost the  
> reference to the commit through perhaps some errant rebasing, then  
> perhaps an object containing the commit (or an object containing the  
> file in that commit) still exists somewhere inside her .git/objects  
> directory? We haven't done any git-gc recently. If so, how can I  
> search through every single git object in her objects directory,  
> searching for perhaps a specific part of the commit string, a line in  
> the code or the filename of the file which was changed? Any help with  
> this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Odds are it is in her HEAD reflog. You can look for it with `git log -g`. If you know some part of the commit message you may be able to filter it down with `git log -g --grep=X` or part of the change with `git log -g -SX`.

A coworker just did something like that today and lost his change; looking in the HEAD reflog and cherry-picking the commit recovered it quite easily.

-- 
Shawn.