Search file contents in all commits, including “abandoned” commits that aren't on a branch/stash

Question

Somehow I thought I had made and committed changes to a file, but the changes no longer appear in my work tree, diffs, or log --patch output. I'm pretty confused, and my only guess is that they were inadvertently discarded by the Git diff algorithm during a rebase or merge operation.

I don't believe my repo has been garbage collected recently, so I would like to try and recover these changes before they are lost and I have to redo them.

How can I search through the contents of all commits for a particular string, including those "orphaned" and no longer located on a path between the root and a branch tip?

Answer 1

One possible solution is to use

git log -g -S <string>

This searches the full text of commits in the reflog . You can also specify a path and most of the other typical log arguments if needed.