Re: git log -Sfoo ignores indentation (whitespace?) changes...

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 3, 2009, 16:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20090303160324.GA32079@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <49AD5164.8090507@sneakemail.com>

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 04:48:52PM +0100, "Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)" wrote:

> If a commit removes mention of foo one place and just accidentally  
> happens to add foo somewhere completely unrelated then it wouldn't show  
> up in the output.

Right. But think for a minute about what it means to "move". If I have:

  foo
  bar

and then change it to:

  bar
  foo

Did "foo" move, or did "bar"?

So I'm not sure that what you're asking for is necessarily well-defined.

> Would be neat with a feature that does what I thought -S did tho...

You can do:

  git log -z -p | perl -0ne 'print if /^[-+].*string/m' | tr '\0' '\n'

which I think is what you want (show any commit that has changed lines that contain the string). But of course you will lose colorizing and automatic paging, and it's a lot slower. And note that whether it finds the example above will depend on how the diff is generated: did "foo" move or did "bar"? But in practice it will generally find what you are looking for.

> Thanks, Jeff, for both the answer and the documentation patch.

You're welcome.

-Peff