Search all of Git history for a string

Question

I have a code base which I want to push to GitHub as open source  In this git-controlled source tree  I have certain configuration files which contain passwords  I made sure not to track this file and I also added it to the  gitignore file  However  I want to be absolutely positive that no sensitive information is going to be pushed  perhaps if something slipped in-between commits or something  I doubt I was careless enough to do this  but I want to be positive   Is there a way to  grep  all of git  I know that sounds weird  but by  all  I mean every version of every file that ever existed  I guess if there is a command that dumps the diff file for every commit  that might work

User · Answer

git rev-list --all         while read revision  do         git grep -F  password   revision     done

User · Answer

Try the following commands to search the string inside all previous tracked files   git log --patch    less   searching string   or   git rev-list --all   GIT PAGER cat xargs git grep  search string    which needs to be run from the parent directory where you d like to do the searching

User · Answer

Git can search diffs with the -S option  it s called pickaxe in the docs  git log -S password  This will find any commit that added or removed the string password  Here a few options   -p  will show the diffs  If you provide a file  -p file   it will generate a patch for you  -G  looks for differences whose added or removed line matches the given regexp  as opposed to -S  which  quot looks for differences that introduce or remove an instance of string quot   --all  searches over all branches and tags  alternatively  use --branches   lt pattern gt   or --tags   lt pattern gt

[git] Search all of Git history for a string?

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