How to find the Git commit that introduced a string in any branch

How to find the Git commit that introduced a string in any branch? (stackoverflow.com)

git log -S <whatever> --source --all

To find all commits that added or removed the fixed string whatever. The --all parameter means to start from every branch and --source means to show which of those branches led to finding that commit.

It's often useful to add -p to show the patches that each of those commits would introduce as well.

Versions of git since 1.7.4 also have a similar -G option, which takes a regular expression. This actually has different (and rather more obvious) semantics, explained in this blog post from Junio Hamano.

---