Git – How to see the changes in a Git commit

diff()gitgit-diffversion control

When I do git diff COMMIT I see the changes between that commit and HEAD (as far as I know), but I would like to see the changes that were made by that single commit.

I haven't found any obvious options on diff / log that will give me that output.

Best Answer

To see the diff for a particular COMMIT hash, where COMMIT is the hash of the commit:

git diff COMMIT~ COMMIT will show you the difference between that COMMIT's ancestor and the COMMIT. See the man pages for git diff for details about the command and gitrevisions about the ~ notation and its friends.

Alternatively, git show COMMIT will do something very similar. (The commit's data, including its diff - but not for merge commits.) See the git show manpage.

(also git diff COMMIT will show you the difference between that COMMIT and the head.)

Related Solutions

Git – How to discard unstaged changes in Git

For all unstaged files in current working directory use:

git checkout -- .

For a specific file use:

git checkout -- path/to/file/to/revert

-- here to remove ambiguity (this is known as argument disambiguation).

For Git 2.23 onwards, one may want to use the more specific

git restore .

resp.

git restore path/to/file/to/revert

that together with git switch replaces the overloaded git checkout (see here), and thus removes the argument disambiguation.

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

In the simplest terms, git pull does a git fetch followed by a git merge.

You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).

A git pull is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.

From the Git documentation for git pull:

In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to discard unstaged changes in Git

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

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