Most recent revision that contains a string

Hello,

What's the easiest way to find the most recent revision (of any file in the repository, including those that have been deleted in the current HEAD) that contains a given string?

I was hoping that "git grep" would do this (like in Mercurial), but as far as I can tell it only greps through the working copy. Or is there a trick that I'm missing?

Thanks, -Nikolaus

On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 02:41:35PM -0700, Nikolaus Rath wrote:

git grep can search through any arbitrary blob, tree, commit, or tag. So you can search through HEAD~10, or HEAD~10:path/to/directory, or HEAD~10:path/to/file. (You can also search the index with --cached, and various other options exist as well.)

If you want to find a change that introduces or removes a particular string, you could use "git log -S". That doesn't allow regexes, but it might do what you want. "git grep" will find occurrences of the string in the current version, and if it has been removed, "git log -S" will find the removal.

I don't know of any way to do that in one file-oriented step, searching backward through the first occurrence of every path, including deleted paths.

On Aug 20 2016, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:

It does, actually, see --pickaxe-regex.

Andreas.

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 10:13:33AM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:

Thanks; I found that after looking up "git log -G", which Eric Wong mentioned in another reply.

Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org> wrote:

I normally do something like:

	git log -r --raw -p -SSTRING
	git log -r --raw -p -GREGEXP

You can also add --diff-filter=D to filter only on deletes.

Btw, please don't set these headers on kernel.org lists:

	Mail-Copies-To: never
	Mail-Followup-To: git@vger.kernel.org

Like any mail server, vger fails from time-to-time and reply-to-all prevents it from being a single point of failure. Thanks.

On Aug 21 2016, Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:

Great, thanks!

Huh? If the list-server fails only I will receive the message so it's still lost for everyone else. But I am more than happy to take this little risk if it saves me from the nuisance of getting duplicate responses.

Best, -Nikolaus

Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org> writes:

On a mailing list, your readers' time is more valuable than yours, simply because there are a lot more of them.

I am typing this message ONLY because I want to talk to YOU, and I
want your address to be on its To: field, with Eric and the list on
Cc: field.  The recipients can prioritize their incoming messages by
reading what's addressed directly to them first and when they have
leftover time they can read ones that they are CC'ed, but because
you used Mail-Followup-To: I had to correct the headers manually,
which means you stole time from me.  And if I didn't then your
Mail-Followup-to: would have stolen time from the other recipients.

Please don't use it on this list.