Find a string in Perforce file without syncing

perforce

Solution

`p4 grep` is your friend. From the perforce blog

'p4 grep' allows users to use simple file searches as well as regular expressions to search through file contents of head as well as earlier revisions of files stored on the server. While not every single option of a standard grep is supported, the most important options are available. Here is the syntax of the command according to 'p4 help grep':

p4 grep [ -a -i -n -v -A after -B before -C context -l -L -t -s -F -G ] -e pattern file[revRange]...

See also, the manual page.

Update: Note that there is a limitation on the number of files that Perforce will search in a single `p4 grep` command. Presumably this is to help keep the load on the server down. This manifests as an error:

Grep revision limit exceeded (over 10000).

If you have sufficient perforce permissions, you can use `p4 configure` to increase the `dm.grep.maxrevs` setting from this default of 10K to something larger. e.g. to set to 1 million:

p4 configure set dm.grep.maxrevs=1M

If you do not have permission to change this, you can work around it by splitting the `p4 grep` up into multiple commands over the subdirectories. You may have need to split further into sub-subdirectories etc depending on your depot structure.

For example, this command can be used at a bash shell to search each subdirectory of `//depot/trunk` one at a time. Makes use of the `p4 dirs` command to obtain the list of subdirectories from the server.

for dir in $(p4 dirs //depot/trunk/*); do
  p4 grep -s -i -e the_search_string $dir/...
done

Problem

Original source