Re: Question: Getting 'git diff' to generate /usr/bin/diff output

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 18, 2016, 07:23 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1607180922580.28832@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <201607171726.u6HHQShO005227@shell1.rawbw.com>

Hi Norm,

On Sun, 17 Jul 2016, norm@dad.org wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> <l.s.r@web.de> writes:
> >
> >The other replies covered how to use the system's own diff instead.
> >Just curious: What makes using git diff difficult and its output hard to
> >deal with for you?
> 
> In decreasing importance order:
> 
> I am 84 years old.

Wow. Chapeau! I am impressed.

Show 5 quoted lines

> I have been using /usr/bin/diff for more than four decades.  And having
> to learn how to read the output of 'git diff' makes learning how to use
> git a more difficult trick for this old dog to learn. True, the diff of
> today is very different from the diff of 1972, but the changes happened
> gradually.

Curious: do you use context diff (GNU diff's default) or unified diffs?

> I have scripts which process the output of /usr/bin/diff.

Even more curious: what do those scripts do? Maybe they do things that we either can already do with Git's diff, or that we can teach Git.

> 'git diff' outputs escape characters which clutter my terminal. Yes, I
> can sed them out, but then why are they there?

Those are most likely the ANSI sequences to add color. Can you call Git with the --no-color option and see whether the escape characters go away?

Ciao, Johannes