Re: git-diff new files (without using index)

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> One thing I often want to do is generate a complete diff of all changes,
> including new/removed files.
> 
> If I add things to the index, I can use "git-diff --cached" to do it;
> however I'd actually like to be able to do this _without_ updating the
> index; in other words, any un-added new file as a change.  As it is, the
> "non-indexed" state seems kind of a second-class citizen, as you can
> never have new files there (or rather, git will never really see them).
 
Use a temporary index:

  (export GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/tempindex;
   cp .git/index $GIT_INDEX_FILE;
   git add new-file;
   git add other-new-file;
   git diff --cached)

We pull this trick sometimes in internal tools, when we want to
produce some result but aren't sure we want to keep the resulting
index, or really know we don't want to keep the resulting index.

Another option is to just add everything, then reset the index:

  git add new-file
  git add other-new-file
  git diff --cached
  git reset

Granted if you had other files staged they just became unstaged
and will need to be restaged...  the temporary index trick above
avoids that.

-- 
Shawn.