How can I search Git branches for a file or directory?

git log + git branch will find it for you:

% git log --all -- somefile

commit 55d2069a092e07c56a6b4d321509ba7620664c63
Author: Dustin Sallings <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Dec 16 14:16:22 2008 -0800

    added somefile


% git branch -a --contains 55d2069
  otherbranch

Supports globbing, too:

% git log --all -- '**/my_file.png'

The single quotes are necessary (at least if using the Bash shell) so the shell passes the glob pattern to git unchanged, instead of expanding it (just like with Unix find).

git ls-tree might help. To search across all existing branches:

for branch in `git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/heads`; do
  echo $branch :; git ls-tree -r --name-only $branch | grep '<foo>'
done

The advantage of this is that you can also search with regular expressions for the file name.