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

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

In addition to richq answer of using git log -g --grep lt regexp gt or git grep -e lt regexp gt git log -g --pretty format h take a look at the following blog posts by Junio C Hamano current git maintainer Fun with git log --grep Fun with git grep 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 lt foo gt --grep lt bar gt or git log --author lt foo gt --grep lt bar gt 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 lt foo gt --grep lt bar gt 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 lt regexp gt 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

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 lt commit gt 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

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

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

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 lt regexp to find when a line containing lt 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

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

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

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

[git] How to search through all Git and Mercurial commits in the repository for a certain string?

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

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