Git – “blame” a deleted line

Solution

If you know the contents of the line:

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

which shows you commits that introduced or removed an instance of the given string.

There’s also:

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

which does the same thing with regular expressions.

Alternatively you can use:

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

to see the latest revision in which the line existed.