87 karma · joined October 7, 2012
Was: Dangling commits in Git are often referred to as commits that are no longer reachable from any branch, tag, or the HEAD. These commits usually occur when you create a commit and then move the branch pointer away from it without creating a new branch or tag. They can also occur during rebases or other history rewriting operations.
Git has a garbage collector (`git gc`) that will periodically clean up these dangling commits, but until that happens, they're still in your repository and can be examined.
Unfortunately, Git doesn't provide a direct command to search for a string in dangling commits. However, you can find these commits using the `git fsck` command, which checks the filesystem for errors and dangling commits.
Here is a way to do it manually:
1. List all the dangling commits using `git fsck --lost-found`. This will print out all the dangling commits and store them in `.git/lost-found/commit/`.
2. For each dangling commit, you can search for a specific string using `git log -p <commit-id>` or `git show <commit-id>` and then pipe the output to `grep`.
Here's an example of what this might look like in a script:
mkdir -p .git/lost-found
git fsck --lost-found
for commit in $(ls .git/lost-found/commit/); do
git show $commit | grep -q "your string here" && echo "Found in commit $commit"
done
Remember to replace "your string here" with the string you are searching for.
*NOTE*: This operation could be time-consuming if you have a lot of dangling commits or a large repository. Also, this approach might not work if the garbage collector has already cleaned up the commits. Make sure to be careful when manipulating Git's internals like this, as it could potentially corrupt your repository if done incorrectly.
Thanks!
nope. nope.