Re: Get a git diff without taking index into account

From: Eric Frederich <eric.frederich@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 18, 2015, 21:38 UTC
Message-ID: <CAAoZyYOT_OQZ+rrwFvnsVBV_sYRA4Oti3vRNnE6_RaV9w8qxdg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20150218183251.GB6346@peff.net>

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 01:27:50PM -0500, Eric Frederich wrote:
>
> If you can persist the index file for each working tree, this will be
> much faster in the long run, too (you can just refresh the index before
> each diff, which means that git does not have to actually open the files
> in most cases; we can compare their stat information to what is in the
> index, and then the index sha1 with what is in the tree).

Could you elaborate on "you can just refresh the index before each diff" What command would I use to do this? I don't want to store some object just to get a diff of it.

Also, how would I go about detecting untracked files the way status does? There is no way to specify a HEAD per git command using switches or environment variables. I can't change the HEAD of the Git repo because other processes may be using it at the same time.