Re: Stepping through a single file's history

From: Pete Harlan <pgit@pcharlan.com>
Date: Jan 31, 2010, 08:26 UTC
Message-ID: <4B653E9F.2080109@pcharlan.com>
In-Reply-To: <43d8ce651001281758x79965b5fn8760b69d4fe82a36@mail.gmail.com>

On 01/28/2010 05:58 PM, John Tapsell wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> 2010/1/29 Ron Garret <ron@flownet.com>:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> Is there an easy way to step through the history of a single file?
>> To be more specific:
> ...
>> (The use case here is remembering that back in the day there was
>> some useful code in this file that I want to retrieve, but not
>> remembering exactly when it was deleted.  So I want to step back
>> through this file's history and do diffs against HEAD.)
> 
> How about simply doing:
> 
> git log -p filename
> 
> and then you can search by pressing "/"  and then typing whatever you
> remember.
> 
> John

Have you tried "git log -Sfoo filename", which finds commits that changed the number of occurrances of string "foo" in filename? I've found that quite useful in digging up deleted code.

It's not as thorough as grepping "git log -p filename", but in practice I've found it very effective.

--Pete