Is it possible to perform a 'grep search' in all the branches of a Git project?

Question

Is it possible to run git grep inside all the branches of a Git control sourced project? Or is there another command to run?

Answer 1

I found this most useful:

git grep -i foo `git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/`

You'd need to adjust the last arguments depending on whether you want to only look at remote vs. local branches, i.e.:

• git grep -i foo $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/remotes)
• git grep -i foo $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads)

The alias I created looks like this:

grep-refs = !sh -c 'git grep "$0" "$@" "$(git for-each-ref --format=\"%(refname)\"" refs/)'