Git Fishing

_{Sat Feb 10 2024}

Let's go fishing with git! 🎣

Background: I work on a team that supports a large, globally available video game. We are in the middle of implementing a set of features and there was a misunderstanding of where the data is to be saved in a database table for the user generated data service, but we have the exact code we are looking for in our git log.

I want to find the code that I wrote before so I don't have to think about how to do the task again because we spent that thought time already (Grug brain dev). my problem is I do not know the hash of what commit the code is in.

I know git and grep and some basic Unix, so let's see what we can do
git log lets me see all of the logs, so that's useful
grep -e 'pattern' helps search for text
git log -p changes the output to the content of the commit
the | character takes output from command and pipes it into another command

git log -p | grep -e 'FirstPublishedDate' will get me closer but the output is rather noisy; the word 'FirstPublishedDate' is a common term in this development. Additionally, the output from grep is only structured by if a line contains that phrase; it's a bit of a salad without the context of git. so let's try again:

git log has -G to do a search, and I can narrow it by the branch name
git log -G'FirstPublishedDate' -p 143495-back-populate-new-filter-values will narrow the search to the branch and do the filtering by pattern for me, and then -p will show me the content
now let's use grep -C 10 to show the ten lines around it, and use a new keyword like @@ to hone in on the hash.

our answer is git log -G'FirstPublishedDate' -p 143495-back-populate-new-filter-values | grep -C 10 -e '@@' with the result

commit 530959f82def537a7f5a764b394dab1b4f3db77c Author: Michael Gardner Date: Mon Feb 5 16:17:36 2024 -0500 removed unused function

Right at the top. A not so unused function after all 🎣