I want to get a quick overview of the local changes in my repository, but I don't want a diff that shows deleted files, since every single line is a minus.
Basically, I want something like 'git diff HEAD <list of modified files only>'. In an ideal world, it would be preceded by the list of deleted and added files, but not show the diffs within them.
I was most of the way through writing a utility that does this:
git diff HEAD `git status | grep modified | cut -d : -f 2`
when I wondered if there was some git-y way to do it instead. Is there a flag I'm missing? I'd love to preserve the color output, too.
In Git versions 1.8.5 and newer, you can do this using the --diff-filter option and specifying "d" (lowercase) to tell it to exclude deleted files.
$ git diff --diff-filter=d
In Git versions older than 1.8.5, you can do this with the --diff-filter option and specifying all but the "D" (deleted) criteria:
$ git diff --diff-filter=ACMRTUXB
For reference the git documentation of version 2.43.2 says:
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)…[*]]
Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.
Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.
Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.