Re Behavior of git log --diff-filter=d

Hi Eric,

Nice question

Yes, this is expected behavior You're seeing a difference because

--diff-filter=d tells Git to exclude commits that have deleted files in their diffs. However, this filter only applies if there is a diff to filter.

In other words, if you run git log --format="%H" --diff-filter=d, Git doesn't show any output unless the diff logic is actually invoked. But --format="%H" alone does not invoke diff generation... so --diff-filter silently does nothing.

When you add --stat or --name-only, you're explicitly telling Git: "Please compute the diff".

Now Git has something to filter, and it applies --diff-filter=d to exclude those diffs that involve deletions.

If you want to exclude deletion commits and get just commit hashes This is something I think should work probably set this up with an alias if you use this many times

git log --format="%H" --diff-filter=d --name-only | grep -v '^$'

This should work just fine...

Or perhaps if you wanna tinker more git log --format="%H" --diff-filter=d --stat | grep -B1 -v "delete mode"

But if you're just trying to filter commits by file change type and want to see only those hashes where a deleted file is not present, you'll need some way to trigger the diff even if you discard the output later.

Hope that helps :)

Thank you,

- Jayatheerth