How can I find out what a previous commit has done?

Question

I switched to a feature branch that I was working on and has been merged into the master branch.

I wanted to find out what changes I made on that branch, compared to the commit from which I created the branch and on which my work was based.

What commands can I use to find out that?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can do a diff with the actual commit ids to see the difference between any two commits in the same branch. You can use this format

git diff [or difftool] {first commit id} {second commit id} [optional path\filename]

e.g.

git difftool 9055ab693fdb1d63b76860b14bc21471e2fafae2 3f2a0e392d868e1af479e44fd6e4385e1b958574 folder\index.html

from gitdiff man page here

Answer 2

If your branch was created from master, then use the following command:

git diff master...your_branch

git diff [--options] <commit>...<commit> [--] [<path>...]

This form is to view the changes on the branch containing and up to the second <commit>, starting at a common ancestor of both <commit>s. "git diff A...B" is equivalent to "git diff $(git-merge-base A B) B". You can omit any one of <commit>, which has the same effect as using HEAD instead.