Excluding files from git-diff

I'm currently working on a script whose developer does not use git. Hence, when I mail him the patch, I don't want to include the .gitignore file. Is it possible to exclude a file from git-diff (except not adding it to git, of course?)

	-Erik

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 04:53:13PM +0200, Erik Hahn wrote:

Just add the content of .gitignore to .git/info/exclude, and remove .gitignore from the repository.

Raphael

Hi,

On Fri, 17 Oct 2008, Erik Hahn wrote:

You can specify everything else:

	git diff -- *

Hth, Dscho

Erik Hahn venit, vidit, dixit 17.10.2008 16:53:

Am I right in assuming that by "script" you mean a manuscript consisting of several files, rather than a single script (programme in scripting language)? In any case:

git diff commit1 commit2 file

gives you the diff for "file" between those commits, so if you're really interested in one file that's the way to go; you can also specify more than one file here.

On the other hand, your .gitignore probably doesn't change that often, so that it shouldn't show up in the diff after that anyways. Or put it in .git/info/excludes.

Cheers, Michael

Michael J Gruber wrote:

For me, adding entries to that file does not make "git diff" or "gitk" or even "git ls-files" ignore files matching the entries. Only "git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude" will exclude them. And "git diff " and gitk don't seem to know the --exclude-from option.

Is there a way to really invert the patterns given to "git diff" or alike? I.e. instead of saying "git diff -- * .somedotfile .someothernongitignoredotfile" one could just say something like "git diff --invert-matches -- .gitignore"? And even better, could one configure some such so that it has effect on all tools by default?

(That would help working around the clutter problem from the "Separating generated files?" thread; i.e. in some cases this could be good enough to not require splitting a project into multiple repositories. (Although I'm all the same currently working on a "intergit-find-matching-commit-in" script, since there may be more good reasons than only the clutter to split projects.))

Christian.

Christian Jaeger <christian <at> pflanze.mine.nu> writes:

Could it be a simple as "excludes" vs "exclude"?

- Eric

Eric Raible wrote:

Nope.

ln -s exclude .git/info/excludes git ls-files # still shows files matching the excludes git ls-files --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude # does not show git ls-files --exclude-from=.git/info/excludes # does not show

Christian.

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 06:30:31PM +0200, Christian Jaeger wrote:

What you are seeing is:

  - ls-files is plumbing, and does not do any exclusion by default. So
    you need to use the --exclude-from option, or more easily,
    --exclude-standard (which pulls in .git/info/excludes, .gitignore,
    and user-level excludes).

  - porcelain _does_ do exclusion. However, exclusion does not mean "if
    this file is tracked by git, don't include it in the diff." It
    merely means "if this file is untracked, pretend like it is not
    there." So a diff displayed by "git diff" isn't affected by
    exclusions anyway.

No, I don't think there is a way to do that currently. I would probably generate the file list with a shell snippet:

  git diff -- `git ls-files | grep -v .gitignore`

but obviously that is a lot more typing if this is something you are doing frequently.

-Peff

Jeff King wrote:

The problem with this is that it won't show files that aren't there anymore but have been previously; in general, for that to work (also with git log, for example), the list of files would need to include all paths which have ever existed and which are not to be excluded. Even then, I'm not sure whether there are corner case where it would not work (when files are being renamed, for example?).

If I/we (after finishing my intergit-find-matching-commit-in experiment) finally decide that tracking generated files in the same repository is the right thing to do, then I guess the only way to ignore those cleanly would be to add an inverse match feature to the Git core.

Christian.

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 06:08:55PM +0200, Christian Jaeger wrote:

Yes, you're right. You really do want to be telling git not "here is the list of files I care about" but "I really care about anything _except_ this set".

And I don't think that is currently possible, so a patch would be necessary (and I think is justified, since there is no other way to do it).

The most flexible thing would be the ability to say "I want these paths (or all paths), and exclude these paths" (sort of like we already do for commits). But defining a good command-line syntax for that would probably be painful, and I really think the only sane use case is "I want all paths except for these". In which case your "--invert-match" seems like a good route.

-Peff

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 12:14:24PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

I looked at this a little, so here's as far as I got, in case it helps you in writing a patch.

There are actually two ways the limiter is used:

 1. diff will show only a subset of the paths, as contained in a
    diff_options.paths variable

 2. the revision walker will prune based based on changes in particular
    paths (e.g., "git log --invert-path -- .gitignore" should show only
    commits that touch something besides .gitignore)

The code to handle '1' might look something like the patch below, but this doesn't deal at all with revision pruning.

---

Erik Hahn wrote:

I don't think that this is what you are asking about, but it's a neat trick anyway :-).

To permanently exclude files from git diff, set up a custom diff driver in ~/.gitconfig:

[diff "nodiff"]
    command = /bin/true

and then mention the files that should use this driver in .git/info/attributes:

.gitignore diff=nodiff