git diff - only show which directories changed

Question

Is there a way to list only the directories that were changed?

If I'm at the git root say, ~/project

Files I changed are

~/project/subtool/file1

~/project/subtool/file2

~/project/subtool3/file1

I just want

~/project/subtool

~/project/subtool3

Answer 1

You could use git-diff with the --dirstat parameter.

In your scenario, let's say you have the following commit:

$ git diff --name-status HEAD~1
M       subtool/file1
M       subtool/file2
M       subtool3/file1

It would produce the following output:

$ git diff --dirstat=files,0 HEAD~1
  66.6% subtool/
  33.3% subtool3/

Make sure to add ,0, otherwise git diff will by default only show directories with at least 3% changes. I also chose files as this is the computationally cheapest option and you do not seem to care about specific changes anyway.

If you are able to use sed you can get rid of the percentage values (you may want to tweak the regular expression a bit to fit your needs):

$ git diff --dirstat=files,0 HEAD~1 | sed 's/^[ 0-9.]\+% //g'
subtool/
subtool3/