List Just The Files Involved In A Commit

As part of a script I was writing I needed a command that could list out all the files involved in a given commit. The git-show command (which is considered a porcelain command) can do this but isn't ideal for scripting. It is recommended to instead use plumbing commands.

The git-diff-tree command is perfect for listing blobs (files) involved in a commit.

$ git diff-tree --no-commit-id --name-only -r <SHA>

The --no-commit-id flag suppresses the output of the commit id, because we want just the files. The --name-only flag tells the command to suppress other file info and to only show the file names. The -r flag tells the command to recurse into subtrees so that you get full pathnames instead of just the top-level directory.

If you're interested, the git-show parallel to this is:

$ git show --pretty="" --name-only <SHA>

See man git-diff-tree and man git-show for more details on these.

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