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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T13:37:42+00:00

Every piece of documentation I’ve read on git (including the online book and the

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Every piece of documentation I’ve read on git (including the online book and the built-in help) says I can type “git diff” from command line, but whenever I do that I get:

usage: git diff [--no-index] <path> <path>

Here’s what I’ve tried so far (all are examples from the documentation):

$ git diff
usage: git diff [--no-index] <path> <path>

$ git diff HEAD
usage: git diff [--no-index] <path> <path>

$ git diff --
usage: git diff [--no-index] <path> <path>

$ git diff -- .
usage: git diff [--no-index] <path> <path>

$ git diff --stat
usage: git diff [--no-index] <path> <path>

$ git --version
git version 1.7.1

Am I missing something here?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Are you actually inside a directory with a Git repository when you’re running these? (git rev-parse --git-dir) The command needs to be able to find the repository and determine what your working tree is in order to produce useful output. Otherwise (if a repository cannot be identified), it defaults to being a plain recursive-diff command, and needs two paths to operate.

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