Find commits that modify file names matching a pattern in a GIT repository

Question

I\'d like to find commits in my code base that add video files to throw them out. Is there a way to look for these files in git ?

For example let\'s say all videos have

Answer 1

you can use git log with a pathspec:

git log --all -- '*.wmv'

this will get you all commits which make changes to .wmv files. yes, this will descend into subdirectories too (but you have to surround your pathspec with single quotes, so it will be passed as is to git).

if you are only interested in commit hashes (scripting etc.) use the git rev-list machinery directly:

git rev-list --all -- '*.wmv'

Answer 2

This can work in gitk as well, using the View / New View / Enter files and directories to include, one per line box.

But note that you need a wildcard that covers the path section of the filename, or else nothing will show.

eg if you have had a file called backup-script.sh, with a varied life (!) appearing in different places in the file tree and you want to see all versions, then you must specify:

*/backup-script.sh

Answer 3

If you want to remove these files from all your commits, consider rewriting the entire history with the filter-branch command. E.g.,

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch -r *.wml' HEAD

Answer 4

To just view the commit hashes and the relevant file names for each commit you can use:

git rev-list --all -- '*.wmv' $1 | while read x; do git diff-tree --name-only -r $x; done | grep -E '((\.wmv$)|(^[^\.]+$))'

This will print out the commit hash followed by any filenames that matching the search string.

Answer 5

If the goal is to remove the files from the repository (thus rewriting history), use the BFG Repo-Cleaner, e.g.:

bfg --delete-files '*.wmv' --private --no-blob-protection

If the files are relevant, you can keep them under version control using Git LFS. To migrate (also rewriting history), you do something such as:

git-lfs-migrate \
    -s original.git  \
    -d converted.git \
    -l https://user:passwd@custom-server.org:8080 \
    '*.wmv'

To simply list or examine the commits, I refer to knittl's answer:

git rev-list --all -- '*.wmv'
git log --all -- '*.wmv'

Answer 6

You can try this:

git log --follow *.wmv

this will list all commits (with hash) that modified wmv files.