On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Unless you are imagining "git grep" to initialize and checkout a
> submodule that is not checked out on-demand, I do not think you have
> any reason to even look at ".gitmodules" for the purpose of "I want
> to grep both in superproject and submodules that are checked out."
In tree-ish mode you may have this example:
git -C superproject rm path/to/submodule
git -C superproject commit -a -m "delete submodule"
... time passes ...
git -C superproject grep --recurse-submodule -e <expression> \
HEAD~42 path/to/submodule
In the last command you need to map the path to submodule to
the name of the submodule to find out the place of the object store
for that submodule and see if it exists.
> If it is working with a tree-ish, again, go look at the object store
> in that submodule repository.
and to find out the object store for that submodule you need the
path -> name mapping at that point in time, i.e. you want to look
at the .gitmodules file at the given tree-ish.