How to search for a phrase into all git commits ?

Question

I need to search a word in all files of my repository and in all version of all files. This because I don't know when, but there is no more a piece of code in one of my file and I want to know when was deleted and recover it.

Answer 1

I don't know if this was what you meant, but if you want to find all commits where commit message contains 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 number of occurences of "word" changed), ie search the commit contents, use so called 'pickaxe' search with

$ git log -Sword

Good Luck :)

Answer 2

What you're looking to do here is grep ( documentation on git-grep ) through the history of all revisions in the repository:

$ git grep <your_search_term> $(git rev-list --all)

Where <your_search_term> is a regex pattern.

The output will include all of the commits including your found text/expression.