Differences for a certain folder between git branches

Question

As in the title, I want to have a diff file for a certain folder between the master branch and a branch I have created.

jolivier · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-01T11:31:47.903

325

You can use

git diff master..yourbranch -- path/to/folder

edited Jul 01 '22 at 11:31

answered Aug 25 '12 at 16:23

jolivier

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Can I specify a certain committer and how to extract this diff to a txt file. – Wazery Aug 25 '12 at 16:25
what do you mean by extracting a certain commiter? retrieve the last commit of this person? To write this diff to a file you juste redirect the output like this ` git diff master..yourbranch path/to/file > filename – jolivier Aug 25 '12 at 16:27
I mean to extract only commits added by a certain author in my branch. – Wazery Aug 25 '12 at 16:30
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but between which ones do you want to diff? the last one? – jolivier Aug 25 '12 at 16:48
I need a diff for a certain author commits between master and mybranch – Wazery Aug 25 '12 at 16:50
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I get `fatal: bad revision 'master..develop_content'` – niklas Sep 20 '16 at 10:02
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Make sure that you have the branches checked out locally if you get that error. – Karl Henselin Mar 07 '19 at 23:08
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Alternatively, `git fetch` and `git diff master..origin/develop_content` – Florian Wendelborn Feb 22 '20 at 19:13
I tried this command but it is not showing all differences. Only new file is shown. – Shashank Bhatt Aug 20 '20 at 06:45
@ShashankBhatt `git diff` has a lot of options that you can learn via `git help diff`. In your case maybe you staged some of the difference and need to add `--staged` to the command in the answer to see them. – jolivier Aug 28 '20 at 12:37
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You now need to add two hyphens to separate the branches from the path: `git diff master..yourbranch -- path/to/folder` – Doug DesCombaz Jun 29 '22 at 16:05

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 26 '12 at 07:26

git diff compares trees (as in hierarchies of source files at two different points in time), so it can't extract the changes done by a certain author. If you want to see what changes a user committed, then you need git log.

Does this solve your need?

git log --author=jdoe oldbranch..newbranch -p -- path/to/subdirectory > myChangesInSubdirectory.patch

This lists each commit done by jdoe between the two commits, printing them as a patch instead of the usual commit summary, limiting only to commits that have changes in the target subdirectory, and redirects the output to a file.

Differences for a certain folder between git branches

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