Find commit to find a very old deleted file in Azure Devops

Question

I started working on this project a little over a year ago, and it seems a file is missing from what may be even longer than that. I am trying to go back into my repo to find when this file may have been removed but I do not know what commit let alone the date or user who may have done it.

It seem that in Azure Devops I can only search by name, path, user, date, or by just going thru every commit ever until I find the file lol. I have gone thru the history of the file that contains it but again without knowledge of the date or user or commit, I have no way to find it?

I have tried git commands, something along the lines of

$ git log --all --full-history -- <path-to-file>
$ git log --all --full-history -- **/thefile.*

or stuff I've found here on stack, like

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'

and all the alternate version of that.

These and many commands or routes to find it in the actual Azure Devops backend site that's attached to Visual Studios... just all don't seem to help.

Hoping anyone knew of a way around this or a command to find it? Thanks!

Answer 1

The first command suggested by PieDev works, but the 2nd set of commands did not return any information, they might not be wrong, they just didn't help me specifically.

This solution to a similar post guided me to the following solution:

git log --diff-filter=D --summary | grep -E 'delete|^commit\s+\S+'

this will display all the deleted files AND the commits that pushed the changes.

Answer 2

What about searching all deleted files?

git log --diff-filter=D --summary | grep delete

Show history on that file (or what you have in your original post)

git log --all -- DeletedFilePath
git show COMMIT_ID -- DeletedFilePath