Differences for a certain folder between git branches

Question

As in the title, I want to have a diff file for a certain folder between the master branch and a branch I have created.

Solution 1

You can use

git diff master..yourbranch -- path/to/folder

Solution 2

git diff compares trees (as in hierarchies of source files at two different points in time), so it can't extract the changes done by a certain author. If you want to see what changes a user committed, then you need git log.

Does this solve your need?

git log --author=jdoe oldbranch..newbranch -p -- path/to/subdirectory > myChangesInSubdirectory.patch

This lists each commit done by jdoe between the two commits, printing them as a patch instead of the usual commit summary, limiting only to commits that have changes in the target subdirectory, and redirects the output to a file.

Comments

[Wazery]

Can I specify a certain committer and how to extract this diff to a txt file.

[jolivier]

what do you mean by extracting a certain commiter? retrieve the last commit of this person? To write this diff to a file you juste redirect the output like this ` git diff master..yourbranch path/to/file > filename

[Wazery]

I mean to extract only commits added by a certain author in my branch.

[jolivier]

but between which ones do you want to diff? the last one?

[Wazery]

I need a diff for a certain author commits between master and mybranch

[niklas]

I get fatal: bad revision 'master..develop_content'

[Karl Henselin]

Make sure that you have the branches checked out locally if you get that error.

[Florian Wendelborn]

Alternatively, git fetch and git diff master..origin/develop_content

[Shashank Bhatt]

I tried this command but it is not showing all differences. Only new file is shown.

[jolivier]

@ShashankBhatt git diff has a lot of options that you can learn via git help diff. In your case maybe you staged some of the difference and need to add --staged to the command in the answer to see them.

[Admin]

You now need to add two hyphens to separate the branches from the path: git diff master..yourbranch -- path/to/folder