How to Find a Deleted Line in Git

The git blame command shows the last author who changed a line. But how can we find out who deleted the whole line? Let’s explore the commands that can help to solve this problem.

Find the commits containing the content of the deleted line

If you know the content of the deleted line, you should run git log to show the commits it is included in.

git log

git log -S <string> path/to/file

To get a more descriptive view, you can add the <kbd class="highlighted">-p</kbd> option.

Instead of a string, you can use regular expression by changing <kbd class="highlighted">-S</kbd> to <kbd class="highlighted">-G</kbd> as follows:

git log with regex

git log -G <regex> path/to/file

Find the latest commit, containing the content of the deleted line

The <kbd class="highlighted">git blame</kbd> command offers a <kbd class="highlighted">--reverse</kbd> option, which processes a commit range backwards to show the last modification before the line was deleted. To find the latest commit that contains the deleted line, identify a commit where the line was present. Then, set that commit as the start point of the range, and <kbd class="highlighted">HEAD</kbd> as the end point.

git blame

git blame --reverse <sha1-commit-hash>..HEAD path/to/file

This shows the latest revision in which the line existed.