Git Grep

Pre-Requisites

A version control system, also known as a VCS, is one of the most crucial tools every developer should have. Git is one of the most widely used version control systems among developers worldwide.

Git is open-source software, which means it may be adjusted to meet particular needs and is free to use. Additionally, it has a lot of great features that attempt to speed up the project process while also facilitating collaboration between teams and individual developers.

Git is simple to use and understand, but it's also a skill that's in high demand.

You must have:

• Git installed 
• Access to a Git repository hosted by another service or a GitHub account 

Introduction to git grep

The grep command comes with Git, and it makes it easy to search for strings or regular expressions in a commit tree, the working directory, or even in the index.

The search performance is significantly faster than with the standard grep tool. Another benefit is that you won't need to organise the project's data. Using grep will produce undesirable results in any untracked files or testing files that could be present in the projects folder. The results from git grep, on the other hand, would be entirely related to the project that you are working on right now because we are only inspecting the current code base.

Options

--cached

Instead of searching tracked files in the working tree, search blobs registered in the index file.

You should search blobs registered in the index file rather than tracked files in the working tree.

--no-index

You can search for files that aren't managed by Git in your current directory.

--untracked

Search also for untracked files within the working tree, as well as the tracked files.

--no-exclude-standard

By ignoring the .gitignore mechanism, you can also search for ignored files. Useful only with the --untracked option.

--exclude-standard

Do not pay any attention to files that have been ignored via the .gitignore mechanism. Searching files with --no-index in the current directory is the only time this feature is useful.

Examples

• git grep 'time_t' -- '*.[ch]' searches all tracked .c and .h files in the current directory and its subdirectories.
• git grep -e '#define' --and \( -e MAX_PATH -e PATH_MAX \) searches for a line in files with lines which match both NODE and Unexpected.

Quickly Search Keywords in Your Projects Using Git Grep

You'll most likely encounter circumstances where you'll need to search for words or phrases throughout your project.

When you have a code editor or Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with you, doing this is simple. However, there are instances when you wish to use the terminal to search in the project directory on the server. How would you go about doing that?

As it turns out, if you've configured Git for your project, it's fairly simple. You can achieve this with the Git command git grep in this situation. The command will provide a list of all file paths and keyword occurrences inside the project directory.

Let's imagine I want to find the phrase "download from" in my project. I can do this using the git grep command, as shown here.

In this case, adding the -n option prefixes the line numbers to the right lines.

Search within and between Commits

The true strength of git grep is that it can search within ANY commit.

Look for a Specific Commit

There are two methods to do that: reference it relative to its HEAD or reference its SHA.

Search across Several Commits

Multiple commit references are also accepted.

Everything between Two Commits Will Be Searched.

This employs the command git rev-list. Here are a few snapshots:

With rev-list and git-grep together, we can:

Find every Instance of "text" between HEAD~3 and HEAD.

Find EVERY Instance of "text" from the Very Start to the Present.