Git Merge: What do the pluses mean?

Question

I ran "git merge" from Terminal on Mac OS X to merge a branch into my master and receive output that looks like:

 spec/models/user_spec.rb    57 ++++++++++++++++++++

What does the "57 ++++++++++++++++++++" mean? Is that how many times I inserted/modified that file? What are all the plusses for?

Answer 1

In complement to other answers: this is the diffstat syntax, not just a Git thing. Git shows the diffstat after a merge, or when you ask for it like git diff --stat which produces roughly the same output as git diff | diffstat.