Detect Changed Files with git

By  on  

There are numerous reasons to want to know which files have been added or modified in a git repository, one of which is your text editor highlighting those files. Another use case is running tasks against only files which are presently changed, like lint or other validation routines.

So how can we identify files which are added or changed? Like this:

git ls-files --others --exclude-standard ; git diff-index --name-only --diff-filter=d HEAD ;

And if you only want to run a routine on a certain portion of files, you can use a regular expression to do so:

{ git ls-files --others --exclude-standard ; git diff-index --name-only --diff-filter=d HEAD ; } | grep --regexp='[.]js$'

The MetaMask team uses the following to run linting on only changed files:

{ git ls-files --others --exclude-standard ; git diff-index --name-only --diff-filter=d HEAD ; } | grep --regexp='[.]js$' | tr '\\n' '\\0' | xargs -0 eslint --fix

Tricks like this are so useful and reliable; you put them in place once and don't consciously think about them again -- and that's OK. Set it and forget it!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using MooTools to Instruct Google Analytics to Track Outbound Links

    Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about who's coming to your website. One of the most important statistics the service provides is the referrer statistic -- you've gotta know who's sending people to your website, right? What about where you send others though?

  • By
    Multiple File Upload Input

    More often than not, I find myself wanting to upload more than one file at a time.  Having to use multiple "file" INPUT elements is annoying, slow, and inefficient.  And if I hate them, I can't imagine how annoyed my users would be.  Luckily Safari, Chrome...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!