Re: Most recent revision that contains a string

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

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

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.