Question

I am writing a pre-commit hook. I want to run php -l against all files with .php extension. However I am stuck.

I need to obtain a list of new/changed files that are staged. deleted files should be excluded.

I have tried using git diff and git ls-files, but I think I need a hand here.

Answer 1

git diff --cached --name-status will show a summary of what’s staged, so you can easily exclude removed files, e.g.:

M       wt-status.c
D       wt-status.h

This indicates that wt-status.c was modified and wt-status.h was removed in the staging area (index). So, to check only files that weren’t removed:

steve@arise:~/src/git <master>$ git diff --cached --name-status | awk '$1 != "D" { print $2 }'
wt-status.c
wt-status.h

You will have to jump through extra hoops to deal with filenames with spaces in though (-z option to git diff and some more interesting parsing)