Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@xSavitar
Forked from lyoshenka/search-git-history.md
Created January 31, 2019 18:39
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save xSavitar/798ea6d7254ee036958bdf88f0a22ee4 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save xSavitar/798ea6d7254ee036958bdf88f0a22ee4 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Search Git commit history for a string and see the diffs

Searching Git commit history

This should be one of the core features of Git, but for some reason it's impossible to figure out how to search for a string in your commit history and see the diffs that that string is in. Here's the best I've come up with:

To find which commits and which files a string was added or removed in:

git log -S'search string' --oneline --name-status

To see the diff of that

git log -S'search string' -p | grep 'search string' -C5

You can also do a regex search by using -G instead of -S.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment