git count files in the staged index

Question

I\'m trying to figure out how to easily count the files in my uncommitted index.

I\'ve tried:

git status | grep \'#\' | wc -l

but there

Answer 1

This has lots of answers... but the best command imo (it doesn't require any piping and is a pure native git command) is just the following. Note that this counts deleted, modified, and added files:

git diff --cached --shortstat

The output is only one line:

X files changed, Y insertions(+), Z deletions(-)

If no changes have been made, it prints nothing (not even a new empty line).

It's also obvious how to get the same result for unstaged changes (just omit the --cached flag):

git diff --shortstat