git status shows changed files but git diff doesn t

Question

I ve had a look at all similar questions  However  I ve double checked and something strange is definitely happening   On one server  Solaris with Git 1 8 1  I cloned the Git repository then copied the  git folder into my existing live files  This worked perfectly  I could run  git status   then  git diff  filename    to check any files that were different   On another server  Solaris with Git 1 7 6  I m doing exactly the same however  git diff  filename    shows nothing  even if the contents of the file is definitely different  I have also tested adding a new file  committing it  and then editing  The same issue  git status shows the file as changed  but git diff shows nothing  If I download the changed file and run a diff locally then I get diff output

User · Answer

git diff -a treats all file as text and it works for me

User · Answer

There are a few reasons why git status might show a difference but git diff might not    The mode  permission bits  of the file changed-- for example  from 777 to 700  The line feed style changed from CRLF  DOS  to LF  UNIX    The easiest way to find out what happened is to run git format-patch HEAD  and see what the generated patch says

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I stumbled upon this problem again   But this time it occurred for a different reason  I had copied files into the repo to overwrite the previous versions   Now I can see the files are modified but diff doesn t return the diffs   For example  I have a mainpage xaml file  In File Explorer I pasted a new mainpage xaml file over the one in my current repo  I did the work on another machine and just pasted the file here    The file shows modified  but when I run git diff  it will not show the changes  It s probably because the fileinfo on the file has changed and git knows that it isn t really the same file   Interesting     You can see that when I run diff on the file it shows nothing  just returns the prompt

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I used git svn  and had this problem for one file  Using ls-tree for each ancestor of the file  I noticed that one had 2 subfolders - Submit and submit  Since I was on Windows  they couldn t both be checked out  causing this issue  The solution was to delete one of them directly from TortoiseSVN Repo-browser  then to run git svn fetch followed by git reset --hard origin trunk

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As already noted in a previous answer  this situation may arise due to line-ending problems  CR LF vs  LF   I solved this problem  under Git version 2 22 0  with this command   git add --renormalize     According to the manual          --renormalize            Apply the  clean  process freshly to all tracked files to            forcibly add them again to the index  This is useful after            changing core autocrlf configuration or the text attribute in            order to correct files added with wrong CRLF LF line endings             This option implies -u

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I added the file to the index   git add file name   and then ran    git diff --cached file name   You can see the description of git diff here   If you need to undo your git add  then please see here  How to undo   39 git add  39  before commit

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I had an issue where hundreds of line endings were modified by some program and git diff listed all source files as changed  After fixing the line endings  git status still listed the files as modified   I was able to fix this problem by adding all files to the index and then resetting the index   git add -A git reset   core filemode was set to false

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For me  it had something to do with file permissions  Someone with Mac Linux on my project seems to commit some files with non-default permissions which my Windows git client failed to reproduce  Solution for me was to tell git to ignore file permissions   git config core fileMode false   Other insight  How do I make Git ignore file mode  chmod  changes

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I had a similar problem  git diff would show differences  but git diff  lt filename gt  would not  It turned out that I set LESS to a string including -F  --quit-if-one-screen   Removing that flag solved the problem

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I ve just run in a similar issue  git diff file showed nothing because I added file to the Git index with some part of its name in uppercase  GeoJSONContainer js   Afterwards  I ve renamed it to GeoJsonContainer js and changes stopped being tracked  git diff GeoJsonContainer js was showing nothing  I had to remove the file from the index with a force flag  and add the file again   git rm -f GeoJSONContainer js git add GeoJSONContainer js

User · Answer

You did not really ask an actual question  but since this is a general use case I m using quite often here s what I do  You may try this yourself and see if the error persists   My assumption on your use case   You have an existing directory containing files and directories and now want to convert it into a Git repository that is cloned from some place else without changing any data in your current directory   There are really two ways   Clone repo - mv  git - git reset --hard  This method is what you did - to clone the existing repository into an empty directory  then move the  git directory into the destination directory  To work without problems  this generally requires you then to run  git reset --hard   However  that would change the state of files in your current directory  You can try this on a full copy rsync of your directory and study what changes  At least afterwards you should no longer see discrepancies between git log and status   Init new repository - point to origin  The second is less disturbing  cd into your destination  and start a new repository with  git init   Then you tell that new repository  that it has an ancestor some place else   git remote add origin original git repo path   Then safely  git fetch origin master   to copy over the data without changing your local files  Everything should be fine now   I always recommend the second way for being less error-prone

User · Answer

I suspect there is something wrong either with your Git installation or your repository   Try running   GIT TRACE 2 git  lt command gt    See if you get anything useful  If that doesn t help  just use strace and see what s going wrong   strace git  lt command gt

User · Answer

I had this same problem described in the following way  If I typed    git diff   Git simply returned to the prompt with no error   If I typed    git diff  lt filename gt    Git simply returned to the prompt with no error   Finally  by reading around I noticed that git diff actually calls the mingw64 bin diff exe to do the work   Here s the deal  I m running Windows and had installed another Bash utility and it changed my path so it no longer pointed to my mingw64 bin directory   So if you type   git diff   and it just returns to the prompt you may have this problem      The actual diff exe which is run by git is located in your mingw64 bin   directory   Finally  to fix this  I actually copied my mingw64 bin directory to the location Git was looking for it in  I tried it and it still didn t work   Then  I closed my Git Bash window and opened it again went to my same repository that was failing and now it works

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Short Answer  Running git add sometimes helps    Example  Git status is showing changed files and git diff is showing nothing       gt  git status On branch master Changes not staged for commit     use  git add  lt file gt      to update what will be committed     use  git checkout --  lt file gt      to discard changes in working directory           modified    package json  no changes added to commit  use  git add  and or  git commit -a    gt  git diff  gt        running git add resolves the inconsistency    gt  git add  gt  git status On branch master nothing to commit  working directory clean  gt

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I ran into this problem  My case was similar to the LESS issue posted by rcwxok   In my case  I set the PAGER environment variable to PAGER  less -RSF    However  unlike the previous answers  I didn t want to remove the -F option  because I explicitly put it there hoping to prevent showing the diff in less if it s shorter than a screenful   To get the desired result  instead of removing -F  I added -X  PAGER  less -RSFX   This both solved the git diff issue and in addition it prevents showing short diffs with less

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TL DR Line ending issue   Change autocrlf setting to default true  I e   checkout Windows-style line endings on Windows and commit Linux-style line endings on remote git repo  git config --global core autocrlf true   On a Windows mahcine  change all files in the repo to Windows-style  unix2dos      Git add all modified files and modified files will go  git add   git status    Background  Platform  Windows  WSL  I occassionally run into this issue that git status shows I have files modified while git diff shows nothing  This is most likely issue of line endings  I finally figured out how it always happen and share here to see if it can help others  Root Cause The reason I encounter this issue often is that I work on a Windows machine and interact with Git in WSL  Switching between linux and Windows setting can easily cause this end-of-line issue  Since line ending format used in OS differs   Windows   r n OSX   Linux   n  Common Practice When you install Git on your machine  it will ask you to choose line endings setting  Usually  the common practice is to use  commit  Linux-style line endings on your remote git repo and checkout Windows-style on your Windows machine  If you use default setting  this is what git do for you   This means if you have a shell script myScript sh and bash script myScript cmd in your repo  the scripts both exist with Linux-style ending in your remote git repo  and both exist with Windows-style ending on your Windows machine  I used to checkout shell script file and use dos2unix to change the script line-ending in order to run the shell script in WSL  This is why I encounter the issue  Git keeps telling me my modification of line-ending has been changed and asks whether to commit the changes  Solution Use default line ending settings and if you change the line endings of some files  like use the dos2unix or dos2unix   drop the changings  If line-endings changes already exist and you would like to get rid of it  try git add them and the changes will go

[git] 'git status' shows changed files, but 'git diff' doesn't

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