# diff-index --cached on bare repository 2 messages from 2009-01-30 to 2009-01-30. Participants: Johannes Gilger, Jeff King. Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/17461 ## Johannes Gilger, 2009-01-30 16:13 Subject: diff-index --cached on bare repository Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/glv901%24c5v%241%40ger.gmane.org ``` Hi list, today I stumbled over the output of "git diff-index --cached HEAD" in a bare repository. While diff-index HEAD just reminds me that I got to have a work-tree, --cached outputs all the files in HEAD as deleted. The question is if this is intended behaviour? Or is it irrelevant because diff-index is only plumbing? I found a mail of the gitk-team working around this, which is funny because I discovered this while working on GitX. So please, enlighten me ;) Greetings, Jojo -- Johannes Gilger http://hackvalue.de/heipei/ GPG-Key: 0x42F6DE81 GPG-Fingerprint: BB49 F967 775E BB52 3A81 882C 58EE B178 42F6 DE81 ``` ## Jeff King, 2009-01-30 20:06 Subject: Re: diff-index --cached on bare repository Message-ID: <20090130200625.GB3054@coredump.intra.peff.net> URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/20090130200625.GB3054%40coredump.intra.peff.net In-Reply-To: ``` On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 04:13:53PM +0000, Johannes Gilger wrote: > today I stumbled over the output of "git diff-index --cached HEAD" in a > bare repository. While diff-index HEAD just reminds me that I got to > have a work-tree, --cached outputs all the files in HEAD as deleted. The > question is if this is intended behaviour? Or is it irrelevant because > diff-index is only plumbing? I found a mail of the gitk-team working > around this, which is funny because I discovered this while working on > GitX. Generally commands which don't make sense in a bare repository are forbidden. But diff-index _can_ work in a bare repository, since there is no reason you can't do index-only operations. However, a bare repo has no index by default, in which case diff-index shows the results you saw. So no, it's not a bug, but it is potentially confusing. I think nobody ever worried about it because diff-index is plumbing, so users are unlikely to stumble into it. -Peff ```