Version Control with Git

git diff with Path Limiting

By default, the command git diff operates on the entire directory structure rooted at a given tree object. However, you can leverage the same path limiting technique employed by git log to limit the output of git diff to a subset of the repository.

For example, at one point^[18] in the development of the Git’s own repository, git diff --stat displayed this:

$ git diff --stat master~5 master
 Documentation/git-add.txt            |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-cherry.txt         |    6 +++++
 Documentation/git-commit-tree.txt    |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-format-patch.txt   |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-gc.txt             |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-gui.txt            |    4 +-
 Documentation/git-ls-files.txt       |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt   |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-pack-redundant.txt |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-prune-packed.txt   |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-prune.txt          |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-read-tree.txt      |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-remote.txt         |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-repack.txt         |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-rm.txt             |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-status.txt         |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-update-index.txt   |    2 +-
 Documentation/git-var.txt            |    2 +-
 Documentation/gitk.txt               |    2 +-
 builtin-checkout.c                   |    7 ++++-
 builtin-fetch.c                      |    6 ++--
 git-bisect.sh                        |   29 ++++++++++++--------------
 t/t5518-fetch-exit-status.sh         |   37 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 23 files changed, 83 insertions(+), 40 deletions(-)

To limit the output to just Documentation changes, you could instead use git diff --stat master~5 master Documentation:

$ git diff --stat master~5 master Documentation ...