Git search commit messages using the command line

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Git search commit messages using the command line

Author：JIYIK Last Updated：2025/03/31 Views：

We can format git logthe command to show commits with commit messages that match a specified pattern. This makes it easier when you want to find a commit but your repository has hundreds of commits.

This article will discuss the process of searching the commit history and filtering by commit messages.

Search commit messages using the command line

Although it would be easier to review our commit history using the git log command with the --oneline flag as shown below.

Use the git log command to view the commit history

The list goes on and on, and since we have over 200 commits in this repository, browsing this list will take time. We can simplify it by formatting the git log command so that it can be filtered according to our needs.

In our case, we want to display the commits whose commit message has Update. We can run git logthe command as shown below.

Order:

$ git log --grep=Update

The command above will display any commit whose message matches the pattern update.

The output is as follows:

Use the git log command to display the commit information of Update

Our repository still has many commits with updates in their messages. We can add the --oneline flag to simplify the output.

Order:

$ git log --grep=Update --oneline

The output is as follows:

Add --oneline flag to simplify display of commit messages

It's that simple. Let's quickly look at other filtering options in Git.

Filter commit history by author

You can git logfilter your commit history by author using the command.

Order:

$ git log --author="Authors-name"

Filter commit history by content

You can use git logto search for commits whose changes introduced or removed specific patterns in lines of code.

Order:

$ git log -S"Content"

Now, let's take an example where we will try to search for commits that introduced or removed the phrase API in a single line of code.

Order:

$ git log -S"API" --oneline

Again, we include the --oneline option to simplify the display.

Output:

Search for commits that introduce or remove the phrase API in a single line of code

Summarize

Git allows us to filter out the output of the git log command when we want to search the commit history . In addition, we can make the output showing the commit history simpler.

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