Git How to: pull diff between branches

Question

I would like to download the files that are the difference between two branches into a local folder. Is it possible with Git?

Given the files are only added to the source branch, they are not changed.

Answer 1

You can get all changes between branches with something around these lines:

git diff origin/master origin/develop > my_diff.diff

If you only add [text] files, then it would be trivial to parse the diff file and break it into individual files. (I'd say, it's a ruby script under 50 lines of code)

Answer 2

git archive --format=tar --prefix="exported/" -o export.tar br2 $(git diff --name-only br1 br2)

Assuming you're on br2 right now and br1 is lagging behind it, the part inside the brackets (git diff... )will give you the list of the files changed between the two heads. The git archive command will export these files as they are on br2 (i.e. on your current head) to a tar file called export.tar inside a directory called exported/.

This assumes (like you stated in your question) that you've only added new files and that all the diffs are adds. The command will also export modified files but you claim not to have any.