Git: Show content of file as it will look like after committing

Question

After reading Git pre-commit hook : changed/added files, the following question arose:

Given I have a file with both staged and unstaged changes, how can I display a preview of the file's contents after staging?

Example:

echo "foo" >> file git add file echo "bar" >> file 

Wanted output:

[previous contents of file] foo 

Answer 1

Use the : prefix to access objects in the current index (staged but not yet commited).

git show :file 

See gitrevisions (which uses the term 'stage 0' for the "normal" index contents):

:[<n>:]<path>, e.g. :0:README, :README 

A colon, optionally followed by a stage number (0 to 3) and a colon, followed by a path, names a blob object in the index at the given path. A missing stage number (and the colon that follows it) names a stage 0 entry. During a merge, stage 1 is the common ancestor, stage 2 is the target branch’s version (typically the current branch), and stage 3 is the version from the branch which is being merged.

Answer 2

Update: the answer from grawity has a much neater solution

This recipe is from jleedev's answer to another question:

git cat-file blob $(git ls-files -s file | awk '{print $2}') 

You might want to create a git alias for that if you're going to use it often.