Search changes to a filename pattern in Git history

This is yet another “search in Git” TIL entry. You could say that Git has a unintuitive CLI, or that is it very powerful.

I wanted to search for an old file that I new that was in the history of the repository, but was deleted some time ago. So I didn’t really remember the name, only bits of it.

I immediately went to the list of TILs I had written on searching in Git, but it wasn’t readily obvious how to do it, so here it goes:

git log -- *pattern*

You could add globs before the pattern to match things on any directory, and add our -p friend to promptly see the diffs:

git log -p -- **/*pattern*