I noticed that, in the case of two trees that differ in the creation or deletion of an empty file, git diff --numstat provides information about the empty file, whereas git diff --stat does not.
$ git --version git version 1.6.1.2 $ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean) $ touch x.txt $ git add x.txt $ git commit -m 'add x.txt' [master]: created 62f3c25: "add x.txt" 0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 x.txt $ git diff --stat HEAD^ HEAD 0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) $ git diff --numstat HEAD^ HEAD 0 0 x.txt
This behaviour surprised me as I had been using diff --stat to get an overview of the current differences between my working branch and the master, and I had created a temporary to-do-list file in that branch which I had subsequently emptied. In closing that branch, I might have inadvertently merged the empty file into the master if I had not remembered it was there. (I will use --numstat instead now.)
Is this small difference in behaviour between the two intentional?
Thanks, Vishvajit Singh