Question

I want to use git log to show all commits that do not match a given pattern. I know I can use the following to show all commits that do match a pattern:

git log --grep=<pattern>

How do I invert the sense of matching?

I am trying to ignore commits that have “bumped to version …” in the message.

EDIT: I want my final output to be pretty verbose. e.g. git log --pretty --stat. So output from git log --format=oneline won’t work for me.

Answer 1

Generate a list of all commits, subtract those whose log messages contain the offending pattern, and feed the result to git log with your desired options. In the final stage, a couple of options to git log are handy:

--stdin
In addition to the commit listed on the command line, read them from the standard input.

--no-walk
Only show the given revs, but do not traverse their ancestors.

You can do it with a single pipeline and process substitution.

#! /bin/bash

if (( $# < 1 )); then
  echo >&2 "Usage: $0 pattern [<since>..<until>]"
  exit 1
fi

pattern=$1
shift

git log --format=%H $@ |
  grep -v -f <(git log --format=%H "--grep=$pattern" $@) |
  git log --pretty --stat --stdin --no-walk

If you don’t want to use bash, you could do it with Perl.

#! /usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
no warnings "exec";

sub usage { "Usage: $0 pattern\n" }

sub commits_to_omit {
  my($pattern) = @_;

  open my $fh, "-|", "git", "log", "--grep=$pattern", "--format=%H", @ARGV
    or die "$0: exec: $!";
  my %omit = map +($_ => 1), <$fh>;
  %omit;
}

die usage unless @ARGV >= 1;
my $pattern = shift;

my %omit = commits_to_omit $pattern;

open my $all, "-|", "git", "log", "--format=%H", @ARGV
  or die "$0: exec: $!";

open my $out, "|-", "git", "log", "--pretty", "--stat", "--stdin", "--no-walk"
  or die "$0: exec: $!";

while (<$all>) {
  print $out $_ unless $omit{$_};
}

Assuming one of the above is in your PATH as git-log-vgrep and with a history of the form

$ git lola
* b0f2a28 (tmp, feature1) D
* 68f87b0 C
* d311c65 B
* a092126 A
| * 83052e6 (HEAD, origin/master, master) Z
| * 90c3d28 Y
| * 4165a42 X
| * 37844cb W
|/  
* f8ba9ea V

we could say

$ git log-vgrep X

to get Z, Y, W, and V.

You can also log other branches, so

$ git log-vgrep A tmp

gives D, C, B, and V; and

$ git log-vgrep C tmp~2..tmp

yields just D.

One limitation of the above implementations is if you use a pattern that matches all commits, e.g., . or ^, then you’ll get HEAD. This is how git log works:

$ git log --stdin --no-walk --pretty=oneline </dev/null
83052e62f0dc1c6ddfc1aff3463504a4bf23e3c4 Z