ignoring changes matching a string in git diff

Question

I\'ve made a single simple change to a large number of files that are version controlled in git and I\'d like to be able to check that no other changes are slipping into thi

Answer 1

Use git difftool to run a real diff.

Example: https://github.com/cben/kubernetes-discovery-samples/commit/b1e946434e73d8d1650c887f7d49b46dcbd835a6
I've created a script running diff the way I want to (here I'm keeping curl --verbose outputs in the repo, resulting in boring changes each time I rerun the curl):

#!/bin/bash
diff --recursive --unified=1 --color \
     --ignore-matching-lines=serverAddress \
     --ignore-matching-lines='^\*  subject:' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='^\*  start date:' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='^\*  expire date:' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='^\*  issuer:' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='^< Date:' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='^< Content-Length:' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='--:--:--' \
     --ignore-matching-lines='{ \[[0-9]* bytes data\]' \
     "$@"

And now I can run git difftool --dir-diff --extcmd=path/to/above/script.sh and see only interesting changes.

An important caveat about GNU diff -I aka --ignore-matching-lines: this merely prevents such lines from making a chunk "intersting" but when these changes appear in same chunk with other non-ignored changes, it will still show them. I used --unified=1 above to reduce this effect by making chunks smaller (only 1 context line above and below each change).