How to search a block of code as a whole

Question

My files has

.settings {
}


.field {
    margin-bottom: 1em;
}

I want to know when

.settings {
}

was formed.

I know if I want to search one line of code, I do git log -S".settings {".

But here I want to search

.settings {
}

as a whole, I tried

git log -S".settings {\r}" confirm.less.css
git log -S".settings {\n}" confirm.less.css
git log -S".settings {\r\n}" confirm.less.css

but all retrun nothing.

How do I search a block of code as a whole containg new line characters?

Answer 1

Try

git log -L '/^.settings {/,+1':path/to/it

That'll get you the whole history of updates to that range, but the oldest of them will be what you want.

Answer 2

There was a few issues getting this to work properly.

First, I think you need to handle the { } metacharacters in your RegEx by escaping them, and enable extended matching with --pickaxe-regex. I also used a simple \s* to greedily match any space including newlines between brackets.

Here is the resulting command that I came up with

git log -S".settings \{\s*\}" --pickaxe-regex confirm.less.css

Which returned the commit containing the first appearance.