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How can I grep Git commits for a certain word?

Asked 2009-08-26T20:34:55.617
887

In a Git code repository I want to list all commits that contain a certain word. I tried this

git log -p | grep --context=4 "word"

but it does not necessarily give me back the filename (unless it's less that five lines away from the word I searched for. I also tried

git grep "word"

but it gives me only present files and not the history.

How do I search the entire history, so I can follow changes on a particular word? I intend to search my codebase for occurrences of word to track down changes (search in files history).

git search grep git-log
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If you want to find all commits where the commit message contains a given word, use

git log --grep=word

If you want to find all commits where "word" was added or removed in the file contents (to be more exact: where the number of occurrences of "word" changed), i.e., search the commit contents, use a so-called 'pickaxe' search with

git log -Sword

In modern Git there is also

git log -Gword

to look for differences whose added or removed line matches "word" (also commit contents).

A few things to note:

  • -G by default accepts a regex, while -S accepts a string, but it can be modified to accept regexes using the --pickaxe-regex.
  • -S finds commits where the number of occurrences of "word" changed, while -G finds commits where "word" appears in the diff.
  • This means that -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex> do not do exactly the same thing.

The git diff documentation has a nice explanation of the difference:

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit,

answered 2009-08-27T10:41:39.983

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