Re: Confusing error message

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 14, 2012, 23:18 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy5npcwk3.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v395xebal.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I messed something up during a rebase in a moved file (probably
>> because I had rename detection turned off).  So now I want to fix it.
>>
>> I think I have the commit amended right, but to be sure I want to diff
>> the old file and the new file.
>>
>>   $ git diff newfile HEAD^:oldfile
>>   fatal: Path 'oldfile' exists, but not 'oldfile'.
>>   Did you mean 'HEAD^:oldfile' aka 'HEAD^:./oldfile'?
>
> You can feed two blob object names to "git diff", but I do not think
> there is any provision to compare a blob object and a file in the
> working tree.

Ah, actually we do have a bolted-on hack to allow you feeding a blob and a file, but I think you still need to follow the command line convention of subcommand name (=diff), any dashed options (e.g. "-R"), any object names (=HEAD^:oldfile) and then finally pathnames (e.g. "newfile").

Does "git diff -R HEAD^:oldfile newfile" work?