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You can run the git diff HEAD command to compare the both staged and unstaged changes with your last commit. You can also run the git diff <branch_name1> <branch_name2> command to compare the changes from the first branch with changes from the second branch. Order does matter when you're comparing branches.
Using git diff <path/to/file_name (or) path/to/folder> : will compare the specified file or files in the folder in your file system against the current checked-out branch (or) tag. Using git diff <tag1(or)branch1 name> <tag2(or)branch2 name> : will compare all modified files between two branches / tags.
Diffing is a function that takes two input data sets and outputs the changes between them. git diff is a multi-use Git command that when executed runs a diff function on Git data sources. These data sources can be commits, branches, files and more.
explainshell.com - git diff --cached. Show changes between the working tree and the index or a tree, changes between the index and a tree, changes between two trees, or changes between two files on disk.
This does exist, but it's actually a feature of git log:
git log -p [-m] [--follow] [-1] <path>
Note that -p can also be used to show the inline diff from a single commit:
git log -p -1 <commit>
Options used:
-p (also -u or --patch) is hidden deeeeeeeep in the git-log man page, and is actually a display option for git-diff. When used with log, it shows the patch that would be generated for each commit, along with the commit information—and hides commits that do not touch the specified <path>. (This behavior is described in the paragraph on --full-diff, which causes the full diff of each commit to be shown.)-m causes merge commits to include the diff content (otherwise these just show the commit message, as if -p were not specified).-1 shows just the most recent change to the specified file (-n 1 can be used instead of -1); otherwise, all non-zero diffs of that file are shown.--follow is required to see changes that occurred prior to a rename.As far as I can tell, this is the only way to immediately see the last set of changes made to a file without using git log (or similar) to either count the number of intervening revisions or determine the hash of the commit.
To see older revisions changes, just scroll through the log, or specify a commit or tag from which to start the log. (Of course, specifying a commit or tag returns you to the original problem of figuring out what the correct commit or tag is.)
Credit where credit is due:
log -p thanks to this answer.--follow option.-n 1 option and atatko for mentioning the -1 variant.-p "means" semantically.-p does not show diff-contents for merge commits.One of the ways to use git diff is:
git diff <commit> <path>
And a common way to refer one commit of the last commit is as a relative path to the actual HEAD. You can reference previous commits as HEAD^ (in your example this will be 123abc) or HEAD^^ (456def in your example), etc ...
So the answer to your question is:
git diff HEAD^^ myfile
If you are fine using a graphical tool this works very well:
gitk <file>
gitk now shows all commits where the file has been updated. Marking a commit will show you the diff against the previous commit in the list. This also works for directories, but then you also get to select the file to diff for the selected commit. Super useful!
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