How to see code changes after git pull?

Question

git log --name-status -2

Will show you the names of the files that changed for the last two commits.

git log -p -2

Will show you the changes themselves.

Before you pull,

git fetch
git log --name-status origin/master..

Will show you what commits you are about to retrieve, along with the names of the files.

Before pulling

You can review changes as @iblue says with a fetch and diff before merging:

$ git fetch
$ git diff master...origin/master

Note the triple period, which means diff against the shared parent and origin/master (commits marked x below):

SP---o---o [master]
  \
   x---x [origin/master]

Just after a pull

The very first line in the output of a pull looks like this:

$ git pull
Updating 37b431a..b2615b4
...

You can then simply do:

$ git diff 37b431a..b2615b4

Or whatever other command:

$ git log --name-status 37b431a..b2615b4

Later on

If it has been a while since you pulled, and you wish to know what changes were brought in by the last pull, you can look it up with:

$ git reflog | grep -A1 pull | head -2

which will show the hash after the pull followed by the hash before the pull:

b2615b4 HEAD@{0}: pull : Fast-forward
37b431a HEAD@{1}: checkout: moving from v6.1 to master

You can then do the same thing with these two hashes:

git diff 37b431a..b2615b4

Because git pull is just a shortcut for git fetch and git merge, you can run git fetch to fetch the branches from the origin and then show the differences before merging. Like this:

git fetch                      # Load changes from remote server
git diff master origin/master  # Show differences
git merge origin/master        # Merge remote changes with local changes

If you run on a different branch than master, you should of course change the branch names in the commands above.

You can compare the pulled contents with the sources of immediately previous commit by,

git diff branch_name@{1}

eg:

git diff master@{1}

For comparing with the sources n commits behind,

git diff branch_name@{n}

You can check what get change while push and pull by this...

git log --stat