Searching subversion history (full text)

Asked 2008-09-04T17:00:59.000

146

Is there a way to perform a full text search of a subversion repository, including all the history?

For example, I've written a feature that I used somewhere, but then it wasn't needed, so I svn rm'd the files, but now I need to find it again to use it for something else. The svn log probably says something like "removed unused stuff", and there's loads of checkins like that.

Edit 2016-04-15: Please note that what is asked here by the term "full text search", is to search the actual diffs of the commit history, and not filenames and/or commit messages. I'm pointing this out because the author's phrasing above does not reflect that very well - since in his example he might as well be only looking for a filename and/or commit message. Hence a lot of the svn log answers and comments.

svn full-text-search

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2 Answers

If you are running Windows have a look at SvnQuery. It maintains a full text index of local or remote repositories. Every document ever committed to a repository gets indexed. You can do google-like queries from a simple web interface.

answered 2009-01-27T23:03:23.387

I wrote this as a cygwin bash script to solve this problem.

However it requires that the search term is currently within the filesystem file. For all the files that match the filesystem grep, an grep of all the svn diffs for that file are then performed. Not perfect, but should be good enough for most usage. Hope this helps.

/usr/local/bin/svngrep

#!/bin/bash
# Usage: svngrep $regex @grep_args

regex="$@"
pattern=`echo $regex | perl -p -e 's/--?\S+//g; s/^\\s+//;'` # strip --args
if [[ ! $regex ]]; then
    echo "Usage: svngrep \$regex @grep_args"
else 
    for file in `grep -irl --no-messages --exclude=\*.tmp --exclude=\.svn $regex ./`;     do 
        revs="`svnrevisions $file`";
        for rev in $revs; do
            diff=`svn diff $file -r$[rev-1]:$rev \
                 --diff-cmd /usr/bin/diff -x "-Ew -U5 --strip-trailing-cr" 2> /dev/null`
            context=`echo "$diff" \
                 | grep -i --color=none   -U5 "^\(+\|-\).*$pattern" \
                 | grep -i --color=always -U5             $pattern  \
                 | grep -v '^+++\|^---\|^===\|^Index: ' \
                 `
            if [[ $context ]]; then
                info=`echo "$diff" | grep '^+++\|^---'`
                log=`svn log $file -r$rev`
                #author=`svn info -r$rev | awk '/Last Changed Author:/ { print $4 }'`; 

                echo "========================================================================"
                echo "========================================================================"
                echo "$log"
                echo "$info"
                echo "$context"
                echo
            fi;
        done;
    done;
fi

/usr/local/bin/svnrevisions

#!/bin/sh
# Usage:  svnrevisions $file
# Output: list of fully numeric svn revisions (without the r), one per line

file="$@"
    svn log "$file" 2> /dev/null | awk '/^r[[:digit:]]+


                        
                        
                            answered 2012-01-07T00:05:21.413



        
        
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