How do I create a patch with full context?
I tried --unified=2000, which gives 2000 lines of context:
git diff --unified=2000 branch master --no-prefix > patch How do I include all the lines in the file without having to specify the maximum number of lines?
This seems to work pretty nicely:
git diff --no-prefix -U1000 With the caveat:
The
-Uflag specifies lines of context. You might need to increase this if there are more than 1000 lines between your changes.
-U option you suggest is the same as the --unified= option used by the asker. The only difference is that you specify fewer lines of context, 1000, than the asker used, 2000. @balki wanted to know how to increase the number to infinity, yet you suggest cutting the number in half. Why?
git show!
--no-prefix option gets rid of the “/a/” and “/b/” destination prefixes that show up by default. (linked page)I know this is old, but I also dislike hard-coded solutions, so I tested this:
git diff -U$(wc -l MYFILE) Using -U seems to be the only way to approach the issue, but using a line count promises that it will work for even a small change in a very large file.
< is not necessary. git diff -U$(wc -l MYFILE) MYFILE
git diff -U$(wc -l MYFILE | awk '{print $1}') MYFILE is a better answer that correctly parses the output of wc by only getting the number of lines without whitespace, not relying on the unquoted output of a subshell to create two arguments, and works on macOS/BSD.Note: git1.8.1rc1 announce (December 8th, 2012) includes:
A new configuration variable "
diff.context" can be used to give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.
so that could help, here, generate a more complete context.
I simply use
git diff -W Git.md to list the full patch to a file. From man git diff:
-W, --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change.
Got inspiration and so I added a git alias.
$ cat ~/.gitconfig | fgrep diff df = "!git diff -U$(wc -l \"$1\" | cut -d ' ' -f 1) \"$1\"" $ git df <file> Update in 2023:
Just found git df does not work sometimes, due to directory change when executing git alias. (See git aliases operate in the wrong directory). Also @Moises Soto mentioned on macOS the wc command works differently (6 spaces at the front of the wc -l output) and suggested to use awk. So this is the updated version:
$ cat ~/.gitconfig | fgrep df df = "! [ \"$GIT_PREFIX\" != \"\" ] && cd \"$GIT_PREFIX\"; ~/bin/git_df.sh" $ $ cat ~/bin/git_df.sh #!/bin/bash for FILE in $@; do git diff -U$(wc -l "${FILE}" | awk '{print $1}') "${FILE}" done exit 0 Update on 2024/12/12:
This is the one-liner version I am currently using, which supports multiple files: (Still, add the following into the [alias] section in your .gitconfig)
df = !"diff_one() { cd ${GIT_PREFIX:-.}; git diff --no-ext-diff -U$(wc -l \"$1\" | awk '{print $1}') \"$1\"; cd -; }; f() { for FILE in \"$@\"; do diff_one \"${FILE}\"; done }; f" you can use it with git df <file1> <file2> ....
This worked for me on macOS:
git diff -U$(wc -l main.htm | xargs) Previously accepted solutions don't work for me when viewing a specific file/commit (the -U option seems to mess with rev/path parsing), but --inter-hunk-context= works in this case on git version 2.24.0:
git diff \ --no-prefix \ --inter-hunk-context=2000 \ master -- \ path/to/file.py If you don't know the file size, you can of course find it with wc -l instead of hard-coding it:
git diff \ --no-prefix \ --inter-hunk-context=$(wc -l path/to/file.py) \ master -- \ path/to/file.py 
diff.context variable in your Git configuration file set to a number larger than the default of 3.