How can I search a word in Git repo over the whole history?

Question

Suppose I remember that I saved a word "XYZword" to some file in a repo but it got killed and I can only remember the initial part "XYZ" but nothing about the time or file. How can I grep this "XYZ" over the whole history?

Answer 1

To search the full history of the current branch and get the line numbers:

git grep -n "XYZ" $(git rev-list --all)

Answer 2

git log -S[SOME_WORD_OR_REGEX] will search your history for any changes that contain the word or regex you supplied. For more information, check out the pickaxe entry in gitdiffcore(7).