How to find the Git commit that introduced a string in any branch

Question

I want to be able to find a certain string which was introduced in any commit in any branch  how can I do that  I found something  that I modified for Win32   but git whatchanged doesn t seem to be looking into the different branches  ignore the py3k chunk  it s just a msys win line feed fix   git whatchanged --  lt file gt      grep   commit       python -c  exec   import sys msvcrt os nmsvcrt setmode sys stdout fileno    os O BINARY  nfor l in sys stdin  print l split   1           xargs -i  git show origin   --  lt file gt    It doesn t really matter if your solution is slow

User · Answer

Mark Longair   s answer is excellent  but I have found this simpler version to work for me   git log -S whatever

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Messing around with the same answers     git config --global alias find   git log --color -p -S        is needed because other way  git do not pass argument correctly to -S  See this response --color and -p helps to show exactly  whatchanged    Now you can do     git find  lt whatever gt    or    git find  lt whatever gt  --all   git find  lt whatever gt  master develop

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While this doesn t directly answer you question  I think it might be a good solution for you in the future  I saw a part of my code  which was bad  Didn t know who wrote it or when  I could see all changes from the file  but it was clear that the code had been moved from some other file to this one  I wanted to find who actually added it in the first place   To do this  I used Git bisect  which quickly let me find the sinner   I ran git bisect start and then git bisect bad  because the revision checked out had the issue  Since I didn t know when the problem occured  I targetted the first commit for the  good   git bisect good  lt initial sha gt    Then I just kept searching the repo for the bad code  When I found it  I ran git bisect bad  and when it wasn t there  git bisect good   In  11 steps  I had covered  1000 commits and found the exact commit  where the issue was introduced  Pretty great

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git log -S string to search    options like --source --reverse --all etc   Pay attention not to use spaces between S and  string to search   In some setups  git 1 7 1   you ll get an error like   fatal  ambiguous argument  string to search   unknown revision or path not in the working tree  Use  --  to separate paths from revisions

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--reverse is also helpful since you want the first commit that made the change   git log --all -p --reverse --source -S  needle    This way older commits will appear first

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Not sure why the accepted answer doesn t work in my environment  finally I run below command to get what I need  git log --pretty format   h -  an   ar    s  grep  STRING

User · Answer

You can do   git log -S  lt whatever gt  --source --all   To find all commits that added or removed the fixed string whatever   The --all parameter means to start from every branch and --source means to show which of those branches led to finding that commit   It s often useful to add -p to show the patches that each of those commits would introduce as well   Versions of git since 1 7 4 also have a similar -G option  which takes a regular expression   This actually has different  and rather more obvious  semantics  explained in this blog post from Junio Hamano   As thameera points out in the comments  you need to put quotes around the search term if it contains spaces or other special characters  for example   git log -S  hello world  --source --all git log -S  dude  where s my car   --source --all   Here s an example using -G to find occurrences of function foo       git log -G     s  function foo        s      --source --all

[git] How to find the Git commit that introduced a string in any branch?

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