如何显示在 git 工作树中修改的分支上更改的文件

Question

I need Linux-only shell pipeline or single script that shows the list of files that I've locally modified (either staged or unstaged) that are already committed into some different branch, call that topic-branch , without having to first commit my changes onto any branch. Typically, topic-branch , would be master , but not always. The current git repository may or may not be checked out into topic-branch .

Ideally, the above should be expressed as a single git command whereby I pass it a name of a branch, and it outputs the list in the format that is emitted by this command:

git ls-files --full-name

I am not asking for comparing what is already checked into two separate branches, as there are answers for that already.

Answer 1

This is the answer I have right now, and it works: I add the following script into a directory that is in my $PATH , called git-cfm , give it execute permissions, and then can invoke it via simply:

git cfm

However, this is not the solution I'm looking for, because it incurs a social burden to convince my fellow developers to modify their $PATH in their startup scripts ( ~/.bashrc or ~/.cshrc etc.) to include the central directory where the git-cfm file would resides. Strangely enough, this is technically possible, but sociologically difficult in my social context:

#!/bin/bash

# git-cfm: <c>hanged <f>iles on <m>aster
#
# List files that have been changed on $branch, that are
# also locally modified (or staged for commit).
# 
# This could be simplified by using, say, Python.
#

# Default $branch to master
branch=${1:-master}

(
  # Get the status using -s which shows both unstaged and staged files
  # in a line-sequential output format, rip off the first column using
  # cut, and then call git-ls-files multiple times on each one to get
  # the full-name of each of them (e.g., a path relative to whatever
  # directory would be returned by "git rev-parse --show-toplevel") .
  # Use the -r option on the call to git-ls-files to avoid calling
  # git-ls-files _unless_ there is actual output from the command,
  # because without the -r, git-ls-files will dump ALL of the files
  # relative to the current working directory, which is NOT what we
  # want.  What we want is the full path name, relative to the
  # top-level directory of the working tree. :
  git status -s 2>/dev/null | cut -c4- | xargs -n100 -r git ls-files --full-name

  # In addition to the above possibly empty output, get all files from
  # all commits on the master branch, that are not changed from
  # commits on the current branch.  Uniquify the output, because of
  # commits that change the same file will result in duplicate files
  # being listed. The empty --pretty option prevents git log default
  # output to include the commit hash, and instead only give us the
  # filenames by using the --name-only option. This comes out as
  # "full-path"'s as indicated above, and is the reason for the
  # --full-name above, too:
  git log --pretty= --name-only @..master | sort | uniq

  # Explanation of the subsequent pipeline below: The file sort and
  # uniq -c emits lines that give counts of occurances in the input.
  # Any occurrances greater than 1 are the ones that we want, so we
  # use awk to show only those. This is just set-theory (AND
  # operation) of the two sets (one set of files per pipeline above)
  # above:
) | sort | uniq -c | awk '{ if ($1 != 1) { print $2; } }'