How to see the changes between two commits without commits in-between?

Question

you can simply pass the 2 commits to git diff like :

-> git diff 0da94be  59ff30c > my.patch
-> git apply my.patch

Asking for the difference /between/ two commits without including the commits in-between makes little sense. Commits are just snapshots of the contents of the repository; asking for the difference between two necessarily includes them. So the question then is, what are you really looking for?

As William suggested, cherry-picking can give you the delta of a single commit rebased on top of another. That is:

$ git checkout 012345
$ git cherry-pick -n abcdef
$ git diff --cached

This takes commit 'abcdef', compares it to its immediate ancestor, then applies that difference on top of '012345'. This new difference is then shown - the only change is the context comes from '012345' rather than 'abcdef's immediate ancestor. Of course, you may get conflicts and etc, so it's not a very useful process in most cases.

If you're just interested in abcdef itself, you can do:

$ git log -u -1 abcdef

This compares abcdef to its immediate ancestor, alone, and is usually what you want.

And of course

$ git diff 012345..abcdef

gives you all differences between those two commits.

It would help to get a better idea of what you're trying to achieve - as I mentioned, asking for the difference between two commits without what's in between doesn't actually make sense.

To compare two git commits 12345 and abcdef as patches one can use the diff command as

diff <(git show 123456) <(git show abcdef)

git diff <a-commit> <another-commit> path

Example:

git diff commit1 commit2 config/routes.rb

It shows the difference on that file between those commits.