How to get a list of all files that changed between two Git commits?

To find the names of all files modified since your last commit:

git diff --name-only

Or (for a bit more information, including untracked files):

git status

When I have added/modified/deleted many files (since the last commit), I like to look at those modifications in chronological order.

For that I use:

  • To list all non-staged files: 

    git ls-files --other --modified --exclude-standard

  • To get the last modified date for each file:

    while read filename; do  echo -n "$(stat -c%y -- $filename 2> /dev/null) "; echo $filename;  done

Although ruvim suggests in the comments:

xargs -0 stat -c '%y %n' --

  • To sort them from oldest to more recent:

    sort

An alias makes it easier to use:

alias gstlast='git ls-files --other --modified --exclude-standard|while read filename; do  echo -n "$(stat -c%y -- $filename 2> /dev/null) "; echo $filename;  done|sort'

Or (shorter and more efficient, thanks to ruvim)

alias gstlast='git ls-files --other --modified --exclude-standard|xargs -0 stat -c '%y %n' --|sort'

For example:

username@hostname:~> gstlast
2015-01-20 11:40:05.000000000 +0000 .cpl/params/libelf
2015-01-21 09:02:58.435823000 +0000 .cpl/params/glib
2015-01-21 09:07:32.744336000 +0000 .cpl/params/libsecret
2015-01-21 09:10:01.294778000 +0000 .cpl/_deps
2015-01-21 09:17:42.846372000 +0000 .cpl/params/npth
2015-01-21 12:12:19.002718000 +0000 sbin/git-rcd

I now can review my modifications, from oldest to more recent.


  • To list all unstaged tracked changed files:

    git diff --name-only

  • To list all staged tracked changed files:

    git diff --name-only --staged

  • To list all staged and unstaged tracked changed files:

    { git diff --name-only ; git diff --name-only --staged ; } | sort | uniq

  • To list all untracked files (the ones listed by git status, so not including any ignored files):

    git ls-files --other --exclude-standard

If you're using this in a shell script, and you want to programmatically check if these commands returned anything, you'll be interested in git diff's --exit-code option.


For files changed between a given SHA and your current commit:

git diff --name-only <starting SHA> HEAD

or if you want to include changed-but-not-yet-committed files:

git diff --name-only <starting SHA>

More generally, the following syntax will always tell you which files changed between two commits (specified by their SHAs or other names):

git diff --name-only <commit1> <commit2>

Using --name-status instead of --name-only will show what happened to the files as well as the names.

Tags:

Git

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