Filter Your Git Diffs

Sometimes reading a git diff can be a big task. Imagine working through a big file cleanup, removing and modifing hundreds of files, and one of those modifications had an undesireable side effect. How can we filter the noise to find the problem?

git diff has a --diff-filter flag for this purpose. The specific command I used today was:

$ git diff --diff-filter=M HEAD~5 > changes.txt

This showed only modified files over the previous five commits, excluding thousands of deleted references. By directing the output to a file and visually scanning, I quickly found the problem— a forced redirect to HTTPS on the development server.

See git diff --help for more info.

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