Re: Expected behaviour of 'git log -S' when searching in a merged/deleted file?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 22, 2010, 18:17 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzkrx4qp6.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimXk6ei6EAQfvTTfnMzdBqYHkNoaxkEab+atnHd@mail.gmail.com>

Jonathan del Strother <jdelstrother@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I was trying to find a particular string in my project this morning.
> 'git grep mystring' suggested that the string didn't exist in my repo,
> but 'git log -Smystring' turned up a single commit that had added it.
> It took me a long time to figure out that in the past, a branch had
> added that string to foo.c, but a second branch deleted foo.c, and the
> two branches were later merged (deleting foo.c and ignoring mystring).

This is a typical case of the history simplification in action, isn't it?

"log" will give you one possible and simplest explanation of how the project came into the current shape. Because side branches with changes that were discarded before merging it to the history that lead to the commit you run "log" from do not contribute anything to the end result, "log" will not traverse the entire side branch when it sees the merge.

Try your "log" with --full-history, perhaps?