Finding first appearance of text in Mercurial repository

Question

I have a Mercurial repository with ~800 changesets and I need to find the first changeset where the word Example appeared. The word appears inside a .php file and not on a commit comment etc.

What is the quickest/easiest way to do that?

Answer 1

try hg grep Example *.php

hg grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...  search for a pattern in specified files and revisions      Search revisions of files for a regular expression.      This command behaves differently than Unix grep. It only     accepts Python/Perl regexps. It searches repository     history, not the working directory. It always prints the     revision number in which a match appears.      By default, grep only prints output for the first     revision of a file in which it finds a match. To get it     to print every revision that contains a change in match     status ("-" for a match that becomes a non-match, or "+"     for a non-match that becomes a match), use the --all     flag.  options:   -0 --print0              end fields with NUL     --all                 print all revisions that match  -f --follow              follow changeset history, or file                           history across copies and renames  -i --ignore-case         ignore case when matching  -l --files-with-matches  print only filenames and revisions                           that match  -n --line-number         print matching line numbers  -r --rev                 search in given revision range  -u --user                list the author (long with -v)  -d --date                list the date (short with -q)  -I --include             include names matching the given                           patterns  -X --exclude             exclude names matching the given                           patterns  use "hg -v help grep" to show global options 

Answer 2

The selected answer is incomplete:

hg grep --all --files-with-matches 'PATTERN' [FILES] 

is normally what you want.