What does "modified" in git status mean?

What does "modified" in git status mean?

[Mikolas]

I am using git version 1.7.5.1 under cygwin and I'm getting behavior that I'm 
not understanding.

When I do 'git status' in the root directory of the repository, it shows no 
difference. Once I cd to a subdirectory, it starts showing modifications. 
However, 'git diff' shows nothing. 

So it looks something like this:
$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

$ cd foo
$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes not staged for commit:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#       modified:   ../foo/bar

$ git diff
$

I put the following in my gitconfig but that doesn't seem to be doing much.
[core]
       trustctime = false
       autocrlf = input

So my questions are 
1) Is there some way how to tell status to tell me *why* the files are marked 
as modified?
2) Is it normal that git status behaves differently in different directories?

--mikolas



 

Re: What does "modified" in git status mean?

[Seth Robertson]

In message <loom.20120122T174204-274@post.gmane.org>, Mikolas writes:

    1) Is there some way how to tell status to tell me *why* the files
    are marked as modified?

Not as such.  However, I do have a script which, when run from the
root of the working directory, manually compares the on-disk files to
what is checked into git.  This would detect any whitespace or smudge
related changes, or of course any normal user changes.

git ls-tree --name-only -r HEAD | while read path; do if [ ! -f "$path" ]; then continue; fi; sha1=`git show "HEAD:$path" | sha1sum | awk '{print $1;}'`; sha2=`sha1sum "$path" | awk '{print $1;}'`; if [ $sha1 != $sha2 ]; then echo "<$sha1> <$sha2> $path"; fi; done


    2) Is it normal that git status behaves differently in different directories?

I would say not, but perhaps you have a .gitattributes in that
directory? (Which would be a bug) Could you try with a more recent
version of git?

					-Seth Robertson

Re: What does "modified" in git status mean?

[Phillip Susi]

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Hash: SHA1

On 1/22/2012 11:57 AM, Mikolas wrote:
> I am using git version 1.7.5.1 under cygwin and I'm getting
> behavior that I'm not understanding.
> 
> When I do 'git status' in the root directory of the repository, it
> shows no difference. Once I cd to a subdirectory, it starts showing
> modifications. However, 'git diff' shows nothing.
> 
> So it looks something like this: $ git status # On branch master 
> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> 
> $ cd foo $ git status # On branch master # Changes not staged for
> commit: #   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be
> committed) #   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes
> in working directory) # #       modified:   ../foo/bar
> 
> $ git diff $
> 
> I put the following in my gitconfig but that doesn't seem to be
> doing much. [core] trustctime = false autocrlf = input

autocrlf is basically broken, don't use it.
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Re: What does "modified" in git status mean?

[Jeff King]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 04:57:52PM +0000, Mikolas wrote:

> So it looks something like this:
> $ git status
> # On branch master
> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> 
> $ cd foo
> $ git status
> # On branch master
> # Changes not staged for commit:
> #   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
> #   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
> #
> #       modified:   ../foo/bar

Modified files appearing only in some calls to status is definitely odd,
and may be a bug. How close is this to your actual invocation?

In particular, if "foo/bar" is modified, and you do "cd foo && git
status", then the relative path shown by "git status" should be simply
"bar", not "../foo/bar". If you did "cd other && git status", then I
would expect it to say "../foo/bar".

So was the directory you entered the same as the one that contains the
(supposedly) modified file, yielding the output above?

If that is the case, then I might suspect it has to do with path
normalization and case sensitivity. It might be worth seeing if you can
reproduce the problem with a more recent version of git. In particular,
v1.7.8 and later shipped with my 2548183 (fix phantom untracked files
when core.ignorecase is set, 2011-10-06), which fixes some weird bugs
surrounding case-insensitive file lookup.

(Actually, even if that is not the case, it would be worth upgrading and
seeing if the bug is reproducible).

> So my questions are 
> 1) Is there some way how to tell status to tell me *why* the files are marked 
> as modified?

Typically you would ask "diff" for more details. But since "diff" is not
reporting anything, that isn't helpful (and is probably indicative of a
bug).

> 2) Is it normal that git status behaves differently in different directories?

No.

-Peff