Git diff says subproject is dirty

Question

I have just run a git diff, and I am getting the following output for all of my approx 10 submodules

diff --git a/.vim/bundle/bufexplorer b/.vim/bundle/bufe         


        

Answer 1

Also removing the submodule and then running git submodule init and git submodule update will obviously do the trick, but may not always be appropriate or possible.

Answer 2

EDIT: This answer (and most of the others) are obsolete; see Devpool's answer instead.

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Originally, there were no config options to make "git diff --ignore-submodules" and "git status --ignore-submodules" the global default (but see also Setting git default flags on commands). An alternative is to set a default ignore config option on each individual submodule you want to ignore (for both git diff and git status), either in the .git/config file (local only) or .gitmodules (will be versioned by git). For example:

[submodule "foobar"]
    url = git@bitbucket.org:foo/bar.git
    ignore = untracked

ignore = untracked to ignore just untracked files, ignore = dirty to also ignore modified files, and ignore = all to ignore also commits. There's apparently no way to wildcard it for all submodules.

Answer 3

To ignore all untracked files in any submodule use the following command to ignore those changes.

git config --global diff.ignoreSubmodules dirty

It will add the following configuration option to your local git config:

[diff]
  ignoreSubmodules = dirty

Further information can be found here