How Can I Get An Unmodified Copy To Diff In Git

Question

My build is modifying a large file (~256MB) and I want to diff it to the pristine copy. Using a diff tool takes too long and listing the contents is enough for me.

I can do this to list the current contents

 unzip -l build.war > current.txt

How can I get the unmodified copy from git (so that I can do the same thing then diff the text files)? Ideally I don't want to reset the current copy (i.e. I want to leave it in its current modified state)

Justin Howard · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-10T16:59:48.760

1

You can get the unmodified version with

git show HEAD:build.war

So to diff the contents of both archives, run:

git show HEAD:build.war > build.tmp
unzip -l build.tmp > unmodified.txt
unzip -l build.war > current.txt
diff unmodified.txt current.txt

edited Mar 10 '15 at 16:59

answered Mar 09 '15 at 21:39

Justin Howard

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git show seems to be the answer. However, you can't pipe to unzip like that. – opticyclic Mar 10 '15 at 16:23
Wow, thanks. That didn't even occur to me. I modified my answer to reflect that, but it's much less nice now. – Justin Howard Mar 10 '15 at 17:00

How Can I Get An Unmodified Copy To Diff In Git

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