How do I search historic mercurial file content?

Question

I've found an issue in my code where something used to be specified, but is no longer, so I want to search for a particular string through the history of the repository.

Is there a way to do this in TortoiseHg? I know it would take a while, but it'd take me longer...

Nope, it doesn't take a while. Well, about 30 seconds for 1000 revisions. — Stephen, Dec 01 '11 at 00:11
... and then if you did it again it would probably be faster due to having a warm cache. — Chris Morgan, Dec 01 '11 at 01:18

score 42 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 01 '11 at 00:05

42

If you don't mind working with Mercurial via the command line, there's hg grep. It's probably exposed somewhere in the TortoiseHg Workbench, but I don't know.

answered Dec 01 '11 at 00:05

Chris Morgan

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Wow! That was awesome! Much faster than our fisheye server (on svn); and it's specific to my repository! – Stephen Dec 01 '11 at 00:10
Yep, the way hg stores it all locally helps to make such things fast and helpful. – Chris Morgan Dec 01 '11 at 01:18
TortoiseHg Workbench: The second icon from right is "Search" and the 6th icon from the left is "Filter Graph" (this shows up as "Filter Toolbar" in the pulldown menus). You probably want the "Search" function. – Gili Jul 22 '14 at 16:28
To search a specific file: hg grep 'somestring' -l "fileA.js" – hello_harry Jan 11 '16 at 15:21

score 28 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 01 '11 at 00:15

28

Menu "View" -> "Search". This will open the search pane which you can use to search for strings inside your

working copy, all history, specific revision
with inclusion file patterns
and exclusion file patterns

answered Dec 01 '11 at 00:15

Stephen

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How do I search historic mercurial file content?

2 Answers2