git diff --stat exclude certain files

Question

I'm trying to adapt the answers from Exclude file from "git diff" for the --stat flag and failing. The accepted answer (create a driver) seems Unix-only (redirect to /bin/true, whatever this means), plus it creates a driver and assigns it to the file kind of permanently; while I am looking for a switch to temporarily disable the diff for a file (or rather some files).

The scripting solution:

git diff `git status -s |grep -v ^\ D |grep -v file/to/exclude.txt |cut -b4-`

actually calls git status and edits its output—while what I want is to instruct git diff itself to ignore some files while calculating the simple --stat (just lines changed). I went through the git-diff docs, but can't seem to find such an option. Anyone give me a hand ?

$ git --version
git version 2.6.1.windows.1

Answer 1

The exclude pathspec trick, described in Making 'git log' ignore changes for certain paths, works here:

git diff --stat -- . ':(exclude)file/to/exclude.txt'

or, if you are in a subdirectory:

git diff --stat -- :/ ':(exclude,top)file/to/exclude.txt'

The latter can be spelled in various ways. For instance, this also works:

git diff --stat ':(top)' :!/file/to/exclude.txt

as does:

git diff --stat :/: :!/:file/to/exclude.txt

These are described in the gitglossary documentation under the "pathspec" section. Note that the exclude feature is new in Git version 1.9 (and slightly broken until 1.9.2). The leading / is an alias for top and the ! is an alias for exclude, with the long forms requiring the parentheses. The trailing colon before the actual pathname is optional when using the single-character aliases but forbidden when using the parentheses (this rule trips me up every time—I keep wanting to use :(exclude):... rather than :(exclude)...). The single quotes around the (top) and (exclude) pathspec components above are to protect the parentheses from being interpreted by the (Unix/Linux) shells; the Windows shell may have different ideas about which characters need protection.