Backup all modified files in git.
I had some issues with modified files that I couldn't easily but didn't want to fully discard my changes, so I wished to create backups of the modified versions.
git ls-files is a great little command that outputs sets of files (as git sees them) without all the decoration used to make git status more readable. I was attempting to parse the output of git status with sed when someone clued me in to git ls-files
View all modified files (one per line)
git ls-files --modifiedEdit all untracked files in different tabs
git ls-files --others --exclude-standard | vim -pBackup all modified files (to an existing ~/tmp directory):
git ls-files --modified | xargs -i cp {} ~/tmpYou can pipe the output to whatever, I just find myself piping to xargs a lot.
Edit: This tip was originally about adding all modified files using ls-files and xargs. Thanks to @mysz and @twolfson for pointing out git add -u achieves the same goal!
Written by Sequoia McDowell
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7 Responses
git add -u ?
I use "git add -A". Seems simpler... or if "git add -u" does the same thing, it's also simpler.
I agree with the git add -u comments. It is an alias for git add --update. Here is a snippet from the man git-add page:
-u, --update
Only match <filepattern> against already tracked files in the index rather than the working tree. That means that it will never stage new files, but that it will stage modified new contents of tracked files and that it will remove files from the index if the corresponding files in the working tree have been removed.
If no <filepattern> is given, default to "."; in other words, update all tracked files in the current directory and its subdirectories.I personally prefer git add -A (--all) as well which is
git add -A = git add . && git add -uThis means it adds all modified files and untracked files.
-A, --all
Like -u, but match <filepattern> against files in the working tree in addition to the index. That means that it will find new files as well as staging modified content and removing files that are no longer in the working tree.
Thank you twolfsen, mysz! The tipper becomes the tipee. :) I'll rewrite this with (hopefully) more useful uses of git ls-files.
Let me know it the current edit contains any more glaring issues :)
git stash - automatically stashes modifications and gets you back to a clean working directory
git stash pop - applies the saved modifications on top of your clean working directory
See the man page for more.
I would use xargs -I instead since -i is deprecated. I would also copy using the --parents option to prevent overwriting files with the same name. To be on the safe side, I would add {} after xargs -I or it could result in "{}: No such file or directory" error on some systems:
git ls-files --modified | xargs -I {} cp --parents {} ~/temp
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