Question

I’ve been working on a project that needs to touch basically every view (so within the app/views folder), but there’s a lot of views. Given a combination of bash and git, how can a get a list of the files I haven’t committed an edit to since a given revision?

Answer 1

There’s probably a neater way of doing this, but I think the following works:

If the last revision before the changes was fa1afe1, then you can find all the files that changed under app/views with:

git diff --name-only fa1afe1 -- app/views

Also, you can see all of the files that git is tracking under app/views with:

git ls-files app/views

Now you can find all the lines that only appear in the output of one of those commands by using comm -3 and bash’s process substitution syntax:

comm -3 <(git diff --name-only fa1afe1 -- app/views|sort) <(git ls-files app/views|sort)

(You might find it clearer to send the output of the two commands to temporary files and then use comm rather than use process substitution, since then you’ll have a solution that will work with /bin/sh as well and may be easier to understand.)

This command will also show files that were deleted in the changes since fa1afe1, since those files won’t appear in the output of git ls-files. As another caveat, strictly speaking this will just show you files which are different between that commit and now, so it will miss files that were changed in one commit and reverted back to their original content afterwards. If that’s a problem then you can use git log with --name-only and appropriate formatting to build the list of changed files instead of git diff.