Question

This question calls for "line numbers". If you do not care about line numbers in the output, see this question and answer.

---

Basically, I don’t want to see the changed content, just the file names and line numbers.

Answer 1

Note: if you’re just looking for the names of changed files (without the line numbers for lines that were changed), see another answer here.

---

There’s no built-in option for this (and I don’t think it’s all that useful either), but it is possible to do this in Git, with the help of an "external diff" script.

Here’s a pretty crappy one; it will be up to you to fix up the output the way you would like it.

#! /bin/sh
#
# run this with:
#    GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF=<name of script> git diff ...
#
case $# in
1) "unmerged file $@, can't show you line numbers"; exit 1;;
7) ;;
*) echo "I don't know what to do, help!"; exit 1;;
esac

path=$1
old_file=$2
old_hex=$3
old_mode=$4
new_file=$5
new_hex=$6
new_mode=$7

printf '%s: ' $path
diff $old_file $new_file | grep -v '^[<>-]'

For details on "external diff", see the description of GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF on the Git manual page (around line 700, pretty close to the end).