Search filenames with regex

Question

Is there any way to do something like git log <path>, but instead of path using a regex? I want to search commits containing files, whose filenames match a given pattern...

... and while we're at it: Is there also a way to do a git status / git diff only for filenames matching a given pattern?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I would be terrific if any way to do it, would also work for Git v1.7.1.

Answer 1

As far as a pure git solution goes and I'm aware of the only option to match specific file patterns is to use a glob.

git log -- '*.json'

Will give you all files which contain changes to a json file. The same can be done for git status.

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On the other hand it's quite easy to search for regular expressions in the diff or the commit message. git log offers a --grep option to search for matches in the commit message and a -S option to search for strings.

Take a look at this question for further details.

Answer 2

For a simple pattern you could try, for example:

find . -name "*.c" | xargs git log

For a full-blown regex you can use:

find . | grep "REGEX" | xargs git log

If you need previously deleted files to be included in the output, you can use

git log --all --pretty=format: --name-only --diff-filter=A | sort -u | grep "REGEX" | xargs git log --

The first part of the above command, which finds all files that were ever in git, was lifted from an answser to this other question.