Find the Git commit that added a file matching a glob pattern

Question

Is there a Git command that would allow finding the first commit that added a file matching a pattern?

For example, let's say I want to find the commit that first added a file matching the pattern path/prefix/*/subpath/*. I found out that it can be done by combining git rev-list to find commits that added files under a fixed path (e.g., path/prefix), iterate the commits to list the files they added via git diff-tree, and use grep to find files matching the given pattern (e.g., /subpath/):

for COMMIT in $(git rev-list \
                    --reverse \
                    --topo-order \
                    HEAD \
                    path/prefix)
do
  git diff-tree \
    --diff-filter A \
    --name-only \
    --no-commit-id \
    -r "${COMMIT}" |
  grep -q "/subpath/" && echo "${COMMIT}" && break
done

Is there a better way?

Answer 1

"Better" is in the eye of the ... runner, but you can do this with git log and either head or tail. We start with the basic:

git log <options> --diff-filter=A --format=%H -- 'path/prefix/*/subpath/*'

which dumps out all the hash IDs (add --topo-order if desired, add --reverse if desired). Then we just snip out all but the last (if not using --reverse) or first (if using --reverse):

(the git log command) | tail -n 1

This will generally be faster since git log can quickly eliminate the non-candidates, but it could sometimes be slower perhaps.