What is the difference between git diff HEAD
and git diff --staged
? I tried both but both give the same output.
You will be able to see more easily the difference between the two diff with the upcomming (Git 2.3.4+, Q2 2015) git status -v -v
See commit 4055500 from Michael J Gruber mjg, it does a good job explaining the difference between git diff HEAD
and git diff --staged
:
commit
/status
: show the index-worktree diff with-v -v
git commit
andgit status
in long format show the diff between HEAD and the index when given-v
. This allows previewing a commit to be made.They also list tracked files with unstaged changes, but without a diff.
Introduce '
-v -v
' which shows the diff between the index and the worktree in addition to theHEAD
index diff. This allows a review of unstaged changes which might be missing from the commit.In the case of '
-v -v
', additional header lines
Changes to be committed:
# and
Changes not staged for commit:
are inserted before the diffs, which are equal to those in the status part; the latter preceded by 50*"
-
" to make it stick out more.
You can also get different output from the two diff commands if you are running them on an unsuccessful merge, i.e. unmerged paths.
I have not been able to find out why it behaves like this, but you could read more about it here
git diff
View difference between Stage and Working Directorygit diff --staged
View difference between HEAD and Stagegit diff HEAD
View difference between HEAD and Working Directory
img src
img src
origin
refers to the source repository from where it was cloned. HEAD
is a reference to the last commit in the currently checked-out branch. Suppose this output for git status
:
$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
# (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
# new file: y
#
# Changes not staged for commit:
# (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: x
#
As you see, there is one file modified but not staged for commit, and a new file added that is ready to be committed.
git diff --staged
will only show changes to files in the "staged" area.
git diff HEAD
will show all changes to tracked files. If you have all changes staged for commit, then both commands will output the same.
Another edge case difference: In a newly created git repo, where only git init
has been run so far, git diff HEAD
will result in a fatal error (ambiguous argument 'HEAD') while git diff --staged
will produce no output.