svn status like output in git

Today Dave asked me how to get a script-friendly list of untracked files, and modified files… like svn status.

First I suggested that he look at --diff-filter and --name-status options for git-diff.

    git diff --name-status --diff-filter=M

While git-diff can actually report a lot of cool stuff (see the git-diff-files man page for more details), it did not solve all the problems. The above worked for getting the list of modified files, but not for untracked files. We scratched our heads and were unable to get anywhere.

Then Dave found git-ls-files… a primitive I probably have not ran since 2005. Well it turn out that if you need to use things that git-status reports on in a script, you really want to run git-ls-files.

    git ls-files --exclude-per-directory=.gitignore --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude \
                    --others \
                    --modified \
                    -t

Again, see the man page for git-ls-files for more details.