How to find a file in a git repo that was lost

Question

There was once a file in our repo that had some content we need to retrieve. There's too many logs to go one by one. So I was thinking we could run a command to list the files that were created and their commit hash. How can you do that?

• List all files created for every commit in a repo.
• Include the commit hash and file name.

Then I can just checkout that commit and see the file. Alternatively, if you know how to list what commits had the certain file, that would be even better. The file is foo.md let's say. Then I could checkout the last commit of that file.

Answer 1

• there is built cmd in git

git ls-files -d, --deleted         show deleted files in the output

• Use git log --diff-filter=D --summary to get all the commits which have deleted files and the files deleted

git log --diff-filter=D --summary --pretty=format:"%h" --stat

it prints

5d07713
 test2 | 0
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 test2