find PRs that update a file

[edwardchenchen]

when I am going through a repo and I find a bug in a file or a file in a doc repo is old
before I make contributions I wanted to see if anyone has already opened a PR for this file
but going through all the PR is not feasible, especially in large repos with 100+ open PR.

Is there currently a way to find PRs that update a file?

[grahamperrin]

… Is there currently a way to find PRs that update a file?

As far as I can tell: no, not with the usual web interface to GitHub.

Accepted answer https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/104839/224355 offered an example:

is:pr is:open "phrase to search for"

A nice idea, however it's not a reliable approach.

For example:

• https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-quarterly/pulls?q=is%3Apr+cloud-init does find a pull request for a file
• specifying the exact name of the one file in the PR https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-quarterly/pulls?q=is%3Apr+cloud-init.adoc fails to find the PR.

Elsewhere in Stack Exchange: Can I get a list of all pull requests related to a specific file/directory path in GitHub? - Stack Overflow – the only answer uses git, not GitHub.

Reference

Searching issues and pull requests - GitHub Docs

[ossanna16]

Hi there @edwardchenchen and welcome to our community 😄. Thanks so much for asking a great question!

[TWiStErRob]

2 years and 1 major "search rewrite" later:

The path qualifier is not supported when searching pull requests.

It was a promising idea though :(