How to find the number of files changed from one commit to another in git

EDIT: "this will always count the files plus one, cause the --format=oneline includes the commit-hash/header" as mentioned by c00kiemon5ter

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The git whatchanged tool shows you a summary of files that were modified. By itself it lists all commits, but you can also limit it to just the recent n commits:

git whatchanged -1

To count files:

git whatchanged -1 --format=oneline | wc -l

See git help whatchanged for details.

git show --stat

This gives the list of files changed like this:

1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Optionally you can add the commit code if you don't want to get the information from the latest.

git show --stat {commit code without brackets}

Apart from the above listed methods you can do this too:

git diff HEAD^..HEAD --name-only - will give the list of files changed between HEAD and one revision before HEAD (HEAD^). You can replace HEAD^ with a SHA1 of the "from" commit and HEAD with the SHA1 of the "to" commit:

git diff <SHA1-of-from-commit>..<SHA1-of-to-commit> --name-only

So if you pipe the output to wc -l it should give you the number of files changed between commits.