Search all of Git history for a string?

Question

I have a codebase which I want to push to GitHub as open source. In this git-controlled source tree, I have certain configuration files which contain passwords. I made sure not to track this file and I also added it to the .gitignore file. However, I want to be absolutely positive that no sensitive information is going to be pushed, perhaps if something slipped in-between commits or something. I doubt I was careless enough to do this, but I want to be positive.

Is there a way to "grep" all of git? I know that sounds weird, but by "all" I mean every version of every file that ever existed. I guess if there is a command that dumps the diff file for every commit, that might work?

Answer 1

The git log's pickaxe will find commits with changes including "word" with git log -Sword