How do I search all revisions of a file in a SubVersion repository?

Question

I'd like to grep all revisions of a file for a string. e.g. to find when a function was added or removed.

Is there a "simple" way to do this? (i.e. a single bash command line would be nice.) Doing a manual binary search by checking out revisions and testing individually seems too tedious and error prone.

If I was smart enough to commit the change with a useful description then I can grep the log with something like:

svn log myfile.c | grep my_func 

This doesn't provide a revision number though, so I suspect there's a better way to do that too.

Answer 1

I wrote a script to do it

TYpical usage:

perl searchrev.pl Import.php setImportStatus  ---------------------------------------------------------------------- r19565 | johnf | 2009-06-24 14:33:00 +0100 (Wed, 24 Jun 2009) | 1 line ---------------------------------------------------------------------- line 60 $this->setImportStatus($entity_id, $entity_attr_id); --------------------------------------------------------------------- r13722 | john | 2008-03-10 17:06:14 +0000 (Mon, 10 Mar 2008) | 1 line --------------------------------------------------------------------- line 70 $this->setImportStatus($entity_id, $entity_attr_id); --------------------------------------------------------------------- r11692 | paul | 2007-05-23 10:55:45 +0100 (Wed, 23 May 2007) | 1 line --------------------------------------------------------------------- Not found --------------------------------------------------------------------- r11691 | paul | 2007-05-23 10:36:26 +0100 (Wed, 23 May 2007) | 1 line --------------------------------------------------------------------- Not found --------------------------------------------------------------------- r11683 | paul | 2007-05-23 09:04:29 +0100 (Wed, 23 May 2007) | 1 line --------------------------------------------------------------------- Not found 

Here's the script, easy to hack for your own purposes

#!/usr/bin/perl -w  my $file=$ARGV[0]; my $pattern=$ARGV[1];  my @history=`svn log "$file"`; foreach (@history) {     chomp;     if (m/^r(\d+)/)     {         my $revision=$1;         my $sep='-' x length($_);          print "$sep\n$_\n$sep\n";          my @code=`svn cat -r $revision "$file"`;         my $lineno=0;         my $found=0;         foreach my $line (@code)         {             $lineno++;             if ($line=~m/$pattern/)             {                 $line=~s/^\s+//;                 print "line $lineno $line";                  $found=1;             }         }          print "Not found\n" unless ($found);     } } 

Answer 2

The "annotate/blame" command does not do exactly what you want, but it could help:

svn blame — Show author and revision information in-line for the specified files or URLs.

 $ svn blame http://svn.red-bean.com/repos/test/readme.txt  3      sally This is a README file.  5      harry You should read this. 

So, you should be able to find out who added a function. As for finding out who deleted a function, no idea.