Question

Git has the very handy archive command which allows me to make a copy of a particular commit in a .zip archive like so:

git archive -o ../latest.zip some-commit

This will contain the entire working tree for that commit. Usually I just need the changed files since a previous release. Currently I use this to get those files into a zip:

git diff --name-only previous-commit latest-commit | zip ../changes.zip -@

This will however zip files from my working copy, which may have uncommitted changes. Is there some way to get only the changed files as they were committed directly into a zip?

Answer 1

git archive will accept paths as arguments. All you should need to do is:

git archive -o ../latest.zip some-commit $(git diff --name-only earlier-commit some-commit)

or if you have files with spaces (or other special characters) in them, use xargs:

git diff --name-only earlier-commit some-commit | xargs -d'\n' git archive -o ../latest.zip some-commit

If you don’t have xargs properly installed, you could cook up an alternative:

#!/bin/bash

IFS=$'\n'
files=($(git diff --name-only earlier-commit some-commit))

git archive -o ../latest.zip some-commit "${files[@]}"

Written as a shell script, but should work as a one-liner too. Alternatively, change earlier-commit, some-commit, and ../latest.zip to $1 $2 and $3 and you’ve got yourself a reusable script.