Subject: Something like cat-file for the index?

> Hi,
>
> I'd like to have a more technical look into the index file and what/how it
> stores data; call it educational spelunking.
>
> I know the index-format.txt but I'd really like to save me the work to
> implement a pretty-printed output based on it.
> I know ls-files but that's obviously not the whole thing.
>
> So: is there something like cat-file, that basically gives me a readable
> version of the information (version number and all...) in the index already
> implemented or did nobody care until now?

>
> Hi,
>
> Enno Weichert <enno.weichert@gmail.com> writes:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd like to have a more technical look into the index file and what/how
>> it
>> stores data; call it educational spelunking.
>>
>> I know the index-format.txt but I'd really like to save me the work to
>> implement a pretty-printed output based on it.
>> I know ls-files but that's obviously not the whole thing.
>>
>> So: is there something like cat-file, that basically gives me a readable
>> version of the information (version number and all...) in the index
>> already
>> implemented or did nobody care until now?
>
> You can use `git ls-files --debug` and `git ls-files --stage` to get all
> the information about the files in the index.  The meaning of the flags
> is the only thing that's not shown by the command, and I don't think
> there is a tool yet to examine them.
>
> The undocumented --resolve-undo flag to git ls-files shows you the
> resolve undo data that is stored in the index.
>
> If you build git yourself, the `test-dump-cache-tree` helper can be used
> to show all information about the cache-tree that is stored in the
> index.
>
> The you can get the version of the index either by using
> `test-index-version` when you build git yourself, or by using `file
> .git/index`, which in addition will give you the number of entries that
> are in the index.
>
> --
> Thomas
>