How to diff one file to an arbitrary version in Git?

Question

How can I diff a file, say pom.xml, from the master branch to an arbitrary older version in Git?

Answer 1

git diff master~20 -- pom.xml

Works if you are not in master branch too.

Answer 2

For comparing to 5 commit to the current one, both on master, just simply do:

git diff master~5:pom.xml master:pom.xml

Also you can refer to commit hash number, for example if the hash number is x110bd64, you can do something like this to see the difference:

git diff x110bd64 pom.xml

Answer 3

git diff -w HEAD origin/master path/to/file

Answer 4

If you are looking for the diff on a specific commit and you want to use the github UI instead of the command line (say you want to link it to other folks), you can do:

https://github.com/<org>/<repo>/commit/<commit-sha>/<path-to-file>

For example:

https://github.com/grails/grails-core/commit/02942c5b4d832b856fbc04c186f1d02416895a7e/grails-test-suite-uber/build.gradle

Note the Previous and Next links at the top right that allow you to navigate through all the files in the commit.

This only works for a specific commit though, not for comparing between any two arbitrary versions.

Answer 5

If you need to diff on a single file in a stash for example you can do

git diff stash@{0} -- path/to/file

Answer 6

You can do:

git diff master~20:pom.xml pom.xml

... to compare your current pom.xml to the one from master 20 revisions ago through the first parent. You can replace master~20, of course, with the object name (SHA1sum) of a commit or any of the many other ways of specifying a revision.

Note that this is actually comparing the old pom.xml to the version in your working tree, not the version committed in master. If you want that, then you can do the following instead:

git diff master~20:pom.xml master:pom.xml