Re: How to exclude files from "git diff"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 5, 2010, 06:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20100105064509.GC19025@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <6dc9ffc80912180909q2e9cbe30r7c802a2152c5954@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 09:09:15AM -0800, H.J. Lu wrote:

> I have some bookkeeping files in my git repository.  How do I
> exclude them from "git diff"? Does "git diff" support
> 
> # git diff --exclude="foo.*.bar*"

No, I don't believe there is a way to do that. You would have to do something like:

  git diff $(git ls-files | grep -v whatever)

The usual concept of "exclusion" for git is not to track files at all via the .gitignore mechanism. Are these files that have content you really _want_ in the repository, but you just don't want to see them when doing some diffs? Or are they files that could not be in the repository at all?

-Peff