I use git notes in my repository. Sometimes I need to find a commit with note that includes given string. So far I was using this command:
git log --show-notes=* --grep="PATTERN" --format=format:%H The problem here is that this prints every commit SHA with PATTERN, even if it's not in notes only in commit message. Is there a better way for that?
Notes are stored in a COMMITed TREE that's "hidden" off to the side under a notes ref (refs/notes/commits by default). That means you can process them just like content.
$ git grep Testing refs/notes/commits refs/notes/commits:fad066950ba73c309e80451d0d0f706e45adf5a8:This is a test - Testing $ git show fad0669 commit fad066950ba73c309e80451d0d0f706e45adf5a8 Author: Mark Adelsberger <adelsbergerm@xxx> Date: Thu Sep 6 07:51:15 2018 -0500 1 Notes: This is a test - Testing diff --git a/file1 b/file1 index e69de29..038d718 100644 --- a/file1 +++ b/file1 @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +testing There is a placeholder for notes in the format string, %N. I don't know how to print the notes in one line, so I use a loop to test notes of all reachable commits one by one.
Try
git log --format=%H | while read commit;do git log -1 $commit --format=%N | if grep -q "PATTERN";then echo $commit;fi; done You can change echo $commit to git log -1 --show-notes $commit.
You could search each note and only output the corresponding commit if the search matches.
#!/usr/bin/env bash git notes list | while read -r note_and_commit_raw; do note_and_commit=($note_and_commit_raw) git cat-file -p "${note_and_commit[0]}" | grep --quiet 'search string' && git --no-pager log -1 --format=format:%H ${note_and_commit[1]} done Notes:
git log -1 (only output that commit) since it seems like you don’t want the ancestors of those commits git log for each commit--notes instead of --show-notes since the latter is deprecatedgit --no-pager might be unnecessary with such a small formatI use Git Notes daily for my own manually-written notes. In other words there is no program that writes my notes, so I don’t end up with a huge amount of stuff to search through.
Apparently I only have 467 notes in refs/notes/commits. The command takes 1.220s to complete (probably with everything in disk cache etc.) if I provide a search string which matches none of the commits. So this might not really scale if you have a lot of notes.
A more efficient program could probably be implemented by using what Mark pointed out in his answer.
