Re: teach git diff -v/--invert-match?

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 04:29:31PM -0500, Brian Ericson wrote:

I was just working on a reply to my own email as I realized it was
only  dumb-luck that converted 1200 noisy changes into a couple of
dozen.  "-S" matches only  the string itself, not the line the string
resides on.  So, -Sxyz will match if  "xyz" itself was added or
deleted in the diff (if "xyz" is on a line that's changed but  did not
itself change, it won't match).  Funny that I actually knew this -- I
use it to look for System.out.println additions among other things.

Yes (though I couldn't have told you that without experimenting -- I
always assumed it checked whole lines).

Interestingly, if I wanted to know if an import changed (on top of
knowing if imports were added or deleted), eg: -import foo; +import
bar;

That is a bit harder, and AFAIK not possible with -S. You could always
post process the log output. E.g.,:

  git log -p | perl -ne '
    BEGIN { $/ = "commit " }
    chomp; print if /^\+import /
  '

which lets you get quite fancy with the matching.

The current behavior seems to work well to answer questions like "has
somebody added a System.out.println",

The usual question (for me, anyway) is "when did X get introduced?" when
looking for a token.

-Peff