Detail change after Git pull

Detail change after Git pull

Question:

After a Git pull, its output gives a summary on the change amount.

How can I see each or some of the files detailed changes?

Okay, here is my question to Jefromi:

  1. How do I know if I was pulling to master? All I did is “git pull”.
  2. What does master point to and what is the difference between master and HEAD, the two default heads of Git?
  3. How do I see the detailed change in a specific file?
  4. How do I see the change in the summary output by the last git pull again?
  5. What’s difference between git diff and git whatchanged?

Answer:

Suppose you’re pulling to master. You can refer to the previous position of master by master@{1} (or even master@{10.minutes.ago}; see the specifying revisions section of the git-rev-parse man page), so that you can do things like

  • See all of the changes: git diff master@{1} master
  • See the changes to a given file: git diff master@{1} master <file>
  • See all the changes within a given directory: git diff master@{1} master <dir>
  • See the summary of changes again: git diff --stat master@{1} master

As for your question of “how do I know if I’m on master”… well, using branches is an important part of the Git workflow. You should always be aware of what branch you’re on – if you pulled changes, you want to pull them to the right branch! You can see a list of all branches, with an asterisk by the currently checked-out one, with the command git branch. The current branch name is also printed along with the output of git status. I highly recommend skimming the man pages of commands to use – it’s a great way to slowly pick up some knowledge.

And your last question: HEAD is the name for the currently checked out branch. You can indeed use HEAD and HEAD@{1} in this context as well, but it’s a bit more robust to use the branches, since if you go and check out another branch. HEAD is now that second branch, and HEAD@{1} is now master – not what you want!

To save having to ask a lot of little questions like this, you should probably have a look at a Git tutorial. There are a million on the web, for example:

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