How to search through all Git and Mercurial commits in the repository for a certain string?
Asked Answered
E

11

306

I have a Git repository with few branches and dangling commits. I would like to search all such commits in repository for a specific string.

I know how to get a log of all commits in history, but these don't include branches or dangling blobs, just HEAD's history. I want to get them all, to find a specific commit that got misplaced.

I would also like to know how to do this in Mercurial, as I'm considering the switch.

Elison answered 14/4, 2009 at 7:49 Comment(1)
Related: How to grep git commits for a certain word.Palawan
V
339

You can see dangling commits with git log -g.

-g, --walk-reflogs
 Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk reflog entries from
 the most recent one to older ones. 

So you could do this to find a particular string in a commit message that is dangling:

git log -g --grep=search_for_this

Alternatively, if you want to search the changes for a particular string, you could use the pickaxe search option, "-S":

git log -g -Ssearch_for_this
# this also works but may be slower, it only shows text-added results
git grep search_for_this $(git log -g --pretty=format:%h)

Git 1.7.4 will add the -G option, allowing you to pass -G<regexp> to find when a line containing <regexp> was moved, which -S cannot do. -S will only tell you when the total number of lines containing the string changed (i.e. adding/removing the string).

Finally, you could use gitk to visualise the dangling commits with:

gitk --all $(git log -g --pretty=format:%h)

And then use its search features to look for the misplaced file. All these work assuming the missing commit has not "expired" and been garbage collected, which may happen if it is dangling for 30 days and you expire reflogs or run a command that expires them.

Violaviolable answered 14/4, 2009 at 8:53 Comment(8)
Perhaps instead of running "git grep" on a (possibly large) number of commits, which would find all commits that have 'search_for_this' somewhere in a project, use so called "pickaxe" search, i.e. '-S' option to git log, which finds commits that introduced or removed given string, or to be more exact where number of occurences of a given string changed.Hygroscope
You can specify multiple branches, or use '--all' option, e.g. 'git log --grep="string in a commit message" --all'Hygroscope
This just allowed me to find a lost commit for 2 day's worth of work. Totally saved my ass, thanks!Chortle
I've come across some situations where I had commits in my database but not in my reflog. I don't know how common this is. I was trying out different hg/git bridges. I think it can also arise with dropped stashes. In any case, this alias works nicely to catch those cases: !git fsck --unreachable | sed -ne 's/^unreachable commit //p' | xargs git log --no-walkBrandling
Note, that does not include searching note objects. That hasn't been implemented yet: git.661346.n2.nabble.com/…Barrick
To search for ALL commits on ALL branches for a SPECIFIC author you can use git log -g --all --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s" | grep -i <authorNameHere>Cliffordclift
To visualize dangling commits you should use gitk --all $(git log -g --all --pretty=format:%h) (notice the second --all)Kenelm
Is the -g option really necessary? Isn't git log --grep=search_for_this sufficient?Fingerboard
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57

In Mercurial you use hg log --keyword to search for keywords in the commit messages and hg log --user to search for a particular user. See hg help log for other ways to limit the log.

Guthrun answered 21/5, 2009 at 0:37 Comment(5)
Josip wrote that he is considering to switch to Mercurial and that he would also like to hear how it's done there.Guthrun
hg log -k searches commit user name and file names in changesets as well (I see that in commands.py:log), which is one of the few things that I don't understand in hg. There should be separate options to search in commit messages and file names. Seems like hg log --template '{desc}\n'|grep is the sure way.Drye
@GeoffreyZheng: there are ways to do that. See "hg help revsets", esp the desc(), user(), and file() functions. There are also hg log switches for most of this behavior. In my experience, though -k/keyword() is usually the most helpful way to search for things.Steinway
How does one search through actual committed file content... the diffs? I know it would be a slow search, but I want to do a deep search for a missing function name.Pinky
Oh here it is: hg grep --all <term>Pinky
S
26

In addition to richq answer of using git log -g --grep=<regexp> or git grep -e <regexp> $(git log -g --pretty=format:%h): take a look at the following blog posts by Junio C Hamano, current git maintainer


Summary

Both git grep and git log --grep are line oriented, in that they look for lines that match specified pattern.

You can use git log --grep=<foo> --grep=<bar> (or git log --author=<foo> --grep=<bar> that internally translates to two --grep) to find commits that match either of patterns (implicit OR semantic).

Because of being line-oriented, the useful AND semantic is to use git log --all-match --grep=<foo> --grep=<bar> to find commit that has both line matching first and line matching second somewhere.

With git grep you can combine multiple patterns (all which must use the -e <regexp> form) with --or (which is the default), --and, --not, ( and ). For grep --all-match means that file must have lines that match each of alternatives.

Sober answered 17/4, 2009 at 10:11 Comment(1)
Hey Jakub, mind integrating quotes/summaries from those blog posts here? Looks like one of the vintage link-only answers right now.Woodenware
C
11

Building on rq's answer, I found this line does what I want:

git grep "search for something" $(git log -g --pretty=format:%h -S"search for something")

Which will report the commit ID, filename, and display the matching line, like this:

91ba969:testFile:this is a test

... Does anyone agree that this would be a nice option to be included in the standard git grep command?

Cathleencathlene answered 26/5, 2010 at 22:59 Comment(0)
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6

Any command that takes references as arguments will accept the --all option documented in the man page for git rev-list as follows:

   --all
       Pretend as if all the refs in $GIT_DIR/refs/ are listed on the
       command line as <commit>.

So for instance git log -Sstring --all will display all commits that mention string and that are accessible from a branch or from a tag (I'm assuming that your dangling commits are at least named with a tag).

Levasseur answered 14/4, 2009 at 8:49 Comment(1)
This does not appear to be the case for git grep, where --all appears to get translated to / used as --all-match. This looks like a bug to me.. using Git 1.7.2.3 (using $(git rev-list --all) works).Masters
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6

With Mercurial you do a

$ hg grep "search for this" [file...]

There are other options that narrow down the range of revisions that are searched.

Synchromesh answered 20/4, 2009 at 0:42 Comment(2)
I also like the flag hg grep --allPinky
This action is called now hg histgrep, see hg help histgrepLindstrom
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2

Don't know about git, but in Mercurial I'd just pipe the output of hg log to some sed/perl/whatever script to search for whatever it is you're looking for. You can customize the output of hg log using a template or a style to make it easier to search on, if you wish.

This will include all named branches in the repo. Mercurial does not have something like dangling blobs afaik.

Vines answered 14/4, 2009 at 8:54 Comment(2)
I don't understand how this answer is relevant to the specified problem.Brackish
It's an answer to the question for Mercurial, which the original question asks about in the last paragraph.Vines
R
1

if you are a vim user, you can install tig (apt-get install tig), and use /, same command to search on vim

https://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/git-tig/

Royden answered 12/9, 2013 at 15:0 Comment(0)
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1

To add just one more solution not yet mentioned, I had to say that using gitg's graphical search box was the simplest solution for me. It will select the first occurrence and you can find the next with Ctrl-G.

Dorian answered 27/10, 2013 at 4:24 Comment(0)
P
1

One command in git that I think it's much easier to find a string:

git log --pretty=oneline --grep "string to search"

works in Git 2.0.4

Pennsylvanian answered 6/12, 2014 at 4:7 Comment(0)
A
0

For my PowerShell homies: git log | Select-String "what you want to find”

Asymmetric answered 29/9, 2023 at 13:4 Comment(0)

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