Re: Searching all git objects

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

"Sam G." <ceptorial@comcast.net> wrote:
> We recently had a developer make a large commit (mostly centered  
> around one file) which she believed she properly pushed to a remote  
> repository last week, but looking at both her repository and the  
> remote repository, that commit is now nowhere to be found. If somehow  
> the master branch she was working on in her repository has lost the  
> reference to the commit through perhaps some errant rebasing, then  
> perhaps an object containing the commit (or an object containing the  
> file in that commit) still exists somewhere inside her .git/objects  
> directory? We haven't done any git-gc recently. If so, how can I  
> search through every single git object in her objects directory,  
> searching for perhaps a specific part of the commit string, a line in  
> the code or the filename of the file which was changed? Any help with  
> this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Odds are it is in her HEAD reflog.  You can look for it with
`git log -g`.  If you know some part of the commit message you
may be able to filter it down with `git log -g --grep=X` or part
of the change with `git log -g -SX`.

A coworker just did something like that today and lost his change;
looking in the HEAD reflog and cherry-picking the commit recovered
it quite easily.

-- 
Shawn.