If you have a series of commits that record the contents of "what's cooking" reports (i.e., "git log origin/todo -- whats-cooking.txt" in your clone of this project), and have a specific topic name you are interested in (e.g., "jc/test-set-e-clean"), what's the easiest way to find out in which issues of the "what's cooking" report the topic appeared?

   $ git log -Sjc/test-set-e-clean -p whats-cooking.txt

would tell you when it appeared and when it went away, but does not mention anything about the (potentially) multiple issues the topic stayed in the report in between. Git being a tool to track contents but is primarily used to track _changes_ in contents, this may be unavoidable, but it is not very satisfying.

Looking for the string in each and every version, e.g.,

    $ git grep jc/test-set-e-clean $(printf "HEAD~%d " $(seq 0 20)) \
			whats-cooking.txt

may give something close to what I want, but it makes me feel dirty that I have to _guess_ how many is sufficient.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 02:19:49PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

If you know when it is introduced and when it goes away you don't have to guess at all. You should be able to log start..end (and filtering the appropiate subject line).

    topic=jc/test-set-e-clean
    git log $(git log --oneline -S$topic --reverse whats-cooking.txt | \
        head -n1 | cut -d \  -f 1)~1..$(git log --oneline -S$topic \
        --max-count=1 whats-cooking.txt | cut -d \  -f 1)

I know it's a bit long but this way you won't have to guess (and I'm assuming is going in a script anyway). The log command to get the first and last occurrence would go on their own line as well.

    last=$(git log --oneline -Sjc/test-set-e-clean --max-count=1 \
        whats-cooking.txt | cut -d \  -f 1)
    first=$(git log --oneline -Sjc/test-set-e-clean --reverse \
        whats-cooking.txt | head -n1 | cut -d \  -f 1)
    git log $first~1..$last

I would've used --max-count=1 to get just the first occurrence instead of using 'head', but '--reverse', '-S' and '--max-count' don't interact in the way a user might obviously presume (and I'm assuming it's a bug).

P.S. sorry if I end up in your inbox twice, I forgot to cc the list.