til/git/summarize-amount-of-change-for-specific-commit.md

Summarize Amount Of Change For Specific Commit

To get a quick headline summary of the amount of change that happened in a commit, I can use the --shortstat flag. This will sum up file changed, lines added, and lines removed. This can be combined with an empty format flag to suppress all other output.

I can run this for the latest commit on the current branch by referencing HEAD.

❯ git show --shortstat --format= HEAD
 3 files changed, 1046 insertions(+), 462 deletions(-)

Or I can point at some other commit via its SHA:

❯ git show --shortstat --format= 8cbfcdd7
 1 file changed, 238 insertions(+)

I can even summarize the amount of change for the entire feature branch I'm working on by referencing a range between main and the HEAD commit.

❯ git diff --shortstat main...HEAD
 36 files changed, 1125 insertions(+), 134 deletions(-)

See man git-show and man git-diff for more details.