Gitology Recipe: List Files That Have Changed Between Two Revisions

It's often useful to see which files have changed between two revisions. Fortunately, it's as easy as it is useful.

To list all the files that have changed between two revisions, simply:

$ git diff --name-only foo bar

where foo is one revision and bar is the other.

For example, let's say you have a repository containing three files: a, b, and c. You modify "a" and commit. Then you modify "b" and commit.

You'll need the revision IDs for git diff. There are multiple ways to get the IDs, but in our example, I use git log as shown below. (Note that I'm piping the output to egrep to keep the output terse--only the commit lines and the date stamps will be printed. You needn't do this. Also, you will likely be plucking the commit IDs out of gitk or an equivalent tool.)

$ git log | egrep "commit|Date"
commit c29608c8fa81c916bc70d038abe5090073d16a15
Date:   Thu Mar 19 18:10:57 2009 -0700
commit 5a1cf5ccae880596ec80eeb20b22ac69f455e17e
Date:   Thu Mar 19 18:10:43 2009 -0700
commit dd2a334406a0f481b9048a7d9872c1466a528de4
Date:   Thu Mar 19 18:07:50 2009 -0700

Now, list the files that have changed between the two most recent revisions, like so:

$ git diff --name-only 5a1cf c2960
b

That's it! Only "b" changed. In real life, the file listing will doubtlessly be longer and more useful.

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