Find where code was deleted in a Git repository

Question

How do I find code that was deleted?

I ended up finding where it was created with this:

$ git log --pretty=oneline -S'some code' 

And that's good enough, but I was also curious to find where it got deleted, and so far, no dice.

First, I tried git diff HEAD..HEAD^ | grep 'some code', expanding the range each time, until I found the lines where it was removed. Nice, so suppose I found it on range HEAD^^..HEAD^^^, then I do git show HEAD^^^ and git show HEAD^^ with grep, but the code is nowhere to be found!

Then I read up a bit on git bisect, and sure enough, it gives me a single revision where the culprit is supposed to be... Again, git show rev | grep 'some code' comes up empty...

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Hmph, this works for me:

$ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/pknotz/foo/.git/  $ echo "Hello" > a  $ git add a  $ git commit -am "initial commit" [master (root-commit) 7e52a51] initial commit  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)  create mode 100644 a  $ echo " World" >> a  $ git commit -am "Be more specific" [master 080e9fe] Be more specific  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)  $ echo "Hello" > a  $ git commit -am "Be less specific" [master 00f3fd0] Be less specific  1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)  $ cat a Hello  $ git log -SWorld commit 00f3fd0134d0d54aafbb9d959666efc5fd492b4f Author: Pat Notz <[email protected]> Date:   Tue Oct 6 17:20:48 2009 -0600      Be less specific  commit 080e9fe84ff89aab9d9d51fb5d8d59e8f663ee7f Author: Pat Notz <[email protected]> Date:   Tue Oct 6 17:20:33 2009 -0600      Be more specific 

Or, is this not what you mean?

Answer 2

git log -S<string> does the job, but if you need to make more complex searches you can use git log -G<regex>.

From the man:

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.