Find the Git commit that added a file matching a glob pattern-CodePudding

Is there a Git command that would allow finding the first commit that added a file matching a pattern?

For example, let's say I want to find the commit that first added a file matching the pattern path/prefix/*/subpath/*. I found out that it can be done by combining git rev-list to find commits that added files under a fixed path (e.g., path/prefix), iterate the commits to list the files they added via git diff-tree, and use grep to find files matching the given pattern (e.g., /subpath/):

for COMMIT in $(git rev-list \
                    --reverse \
                    --topo-order \
                    HEAD \
                    path/prefix)
do
  git diff-tree \
    --diff-filter A \
    --name-only \
    --no-commit-id \
    -r "${COMMIT}" |
  grep -q "/subpath/" && echo "${COMMIT}" && break
done

Is there a better way?

CodePudding user response：

"Better" is in the eye of the ... runner, but you can do this with git log and either head or tail. We start with the basic:

git log <options> --diff-filter=A --format=%H -- 'path/prefix/*/subpath/*'

which dumps out all the hash IDs (add --topo-order if desired, add --reverse if desired). Then we just snip out all but the last (if not using --reverse) or first (if using --reverse):

(the git log command) | tail -n 1

This will generally be faster since git log can quickly eliminate the non-candidates, but it could sometimes be slower perhaps.