Check For Changes

Git provides several commands to help you see changes in your project files, helping you manage your project easily and helping you capture small and coheirent changes.

Git Status

Even experienced Git users will run the git status command very frequently. This command gives you an overview of all the files that contain changes, changes that have been staged and any files Git is not currenly tracking

untracked files are those that have not been added to the Git repository

If you are using a GUI client for Git, it may be running git status regularly in the background so the information it is displaying is up to date.

Git status only shows the changes happening locally, it will not show changes on any remote repository (ie. on Github). See the section on git log for tracking changes in remote repositories.

Git Diff

Compare changes between the working copy and the staging area. You can compare all files in the project or just the changes in a specific file or filename pattern

    git diff
    git diff filename
    git diff *.md

Compare changes between the staging area and the latest commit

    git diff --cached
    git diff filename --cached
    git diff *.md --cached

Compare changes against a specific commit (version)

    git diff v1.09       ; compare working directory against specific version
    git diff dev master   ; difference between two branches

Using the --stat option to see just the statistics about the changes - eg, you want to see the number of changes rather than all the change details.

    git diff v1.09 --stat