How can I run “git status” and just get the filenames

Question

as opposed to the long relative path?

Answer 1

In addition to the accepted answer, another way of doing it is with awk

git status --porcelain | awk '{ print $2 }'

The $2 selects second the column of each line.

Answer 2

git status will always walk down (edit and up) the tree and display relative paths. If you only want the file in the directory you are in, See this related answer

Answer 3

Aha, I think I just understood the question: you want basenames? Tack on | while read a; do basename "$a"; done to any of the following:

how about

• git diff --name-only

  for changes relative to index

• git diff --name-only --staged

  for ... well staged chages :)

• git diff --name-only HEAD

  got both