After doing a git pull, what is the command to see what changed in the files that got updated?

Question

After doing a git pull, what is the command to see what changed in the files that got updated? examples would be great.

Answer 1

I prefer a simple:

git show HEAD^

Answer 2

git pull will by default report something like

Updating 9e9a656..bb743dd

which is valid input to git log or git diff:

git log -p 9e9a656..bb743dd

git diff 9e9a656..bb743dd

If you lost the git pull output, you can use git reflog to review your own actions:

bb743dd HEAD@{0}: pull origin master: Fast-forward
9e9a656 HEAD@{1}: reset: moving to HEAD^

So in this case, git log HEAD@{1} will also show the contents of the pull, and if you did anything in between (such as a commit)...

1dac876 HEAD@{0}: commit: some stuff
bb743dd HEAD@{1}: pull origin master: Fast-forward
9e9a656 HEAD@{2}: reset: moving to HEAD^

... you can use the .. syntax:

git log HEAD@{2}..HEAD@{1}  # or log -p, or diff

Answer 3

I would use git log to view the commit messages (and SHAs), and git diff <SHA-commitA> HEAD, where is the last commit you had before pull-ing.

Answer 4

git show HEAD~1

Will show what changed in the last commit.

Answer 5

[The following answer assumes that the merge was not a fast-forward merge, and that you didn't ask git pull to use its rebase mode. In case those assumptions are wrong, probably either git log or git log -p or git diff HEAD@{1} HEAD will show you what you want.]

There's two different things you can do: review which commits got merged, and review the changes introduced by the merge. The former is done using git log (as explained in another answer); the latter is a bit more complicated.

Normally, git show <commit> gives you a diff of stuff introduced in the given commit, but for merge commits this produces a reduced "combined diff". The specifics are not terribly relevant here... suffice to say that you won't see a normal diff for merge commits unless you use trickery.

The easiest way to see a diff of the changes introduced by a merge (and any conflict resolution performed as part of it), as compared to the first parent, is git diff <commit>^ <commit> (^ = first parent).

For maximum detail, you can look at the diffs of the individual commits that got merged. I recommend doing this in graph view, making the whole thing slightly less intangible: git log --graph -p

Answer 6

You want to see the files that changed in the last pull. That’s

git diff --name-only HEAD@{1}..HEAD

The git rev-parse documentation explains.

<refname>@{<n>}, e.g., master@{1}

A ref followed by the suffix @ with an ordinal specification enclosed in a brace pair (e.g., {1}, {15}) specifies the n-th prior value of that ref. For example master@{1} is the immediate prior value of master while master@{5} is the 5th prior value of master. This suffix may only be used immediately following a ref name and the ref must have an existing log ($GIT_DIR/logs/<refname>).

Running git pull moves the current branch. HEAD is where it is now, and HEAD@{1} is where it was before the pull.

To see one–character summaries of how the files changed, run

git diff --name-status HEAD@{1}..HEAD

The full details are available in the output of

    git diff HEAD@{1}..HEAD