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I am tracking a project with Git. There are some Xcode project files in the working copy that I want to keep tracking, but I do not want to see in diffs, because there are always dozens of changed lines that I am never interested in. Is there a simple way to have git-diff(1) skip these files?

I’ve tried to set up a custom “silent” diff tool:

$ cat .gitattributes
Project.xcodeproj/* diff=nodiff

$ cat ~/.gitconfig
[diff "nodiff"]
    command = /bin/true

But:

$ git diff
external diff died, stopping at Project.xcodeproj/zoul.mode1v3.

What am I doing wrong?

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
108

The problem is that /bin/true will return immediately without reading its input. git diff therefore thinks, quite reasonably, that it has died prematurely.

You really want to unset the diff attribute, not set it to a bogus command. Try this in your .gitattributes:

Project.xcodeproj/* -diff
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10 Comments

Excluding the whole directory didn't work for me, because many of the files are in deeper subdirs. Instead *.xcuserstate -diff was helpful to ignore the often changing file.
Sure, just wanted to include this since it might help whoever is reading this to solve their situation.
A lot of similar questions on SO, couldn't find an answer as simple and effective as this!
I'm using Git 1.9.4 and adding -diff now makes diff process the files I want to exclude as binary files, instead of ignoring them...
If you want to exclude subdirectories as well, make it Project.xcodeproj/**/* -diff instead.
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8

Another solution that produces clean output without any external tools (add to .git/config):

[alias]
    mydiff = !git diff -- $(git diff --name-only | grep -Ev "Project.xcodeproj/")

Then run it with:

git mydiff

Note that git diff --name-only is better than git ls-files because it will pass a shorter list of files to git diff, since only files that are modified will be included. I've run into trouble with exceeding the maximum number of arguments in large projects when using git ls-files.

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1 Comment

I ran into issues with complex paths with this. I suspect it would better if you used the -z switch: "do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators".
8

You may use an alias in your .git/config file:

[alias]
        mydiff = !git diff | filterdiff -x "*/Project.xcodeproj/*"

You need filterdiff (from patchutils) for this trick.

sudo apt-get install patchutils

Still the diff isn't perfect. It leaves some garbage:

cd ~/git-filter-test
git mydiff

Output:

diff --git a/Project.xcodeproj/dummy.txt b/Project.xcodeproj/dummy.txt
index 3e1f9e6..89dfed9 100644
diff --git a/dummy2.txt b/dummy2.txt
index 91966ce..d9588a9 100644
--- a/titi.txt
+++ b/titi.txt
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 aaaaaaaaaa
-bbbbbbbbb
 cccccc
+ddd
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3 Comments

This is very nice, thank you. The garbage is just fine, at least I know those files changed. But I lose the coloring, is there a way to get it back? I tried git diff --color to force it, but then filterdiff gets confused by the color escapes and stops filtering.
Oh yes, | colordiff | less -r.
Thanks for answers to this question -- filterdiff is nearly meeting my needs -- however, the "garbage" remaining is causing me trouble -- is there a way to say "completely remove all reference to a file" using filterdiff?
2

Just in case someone else has the same pain we had. We wanted to exclude a file that had already been committed.

This post was way more useful: How can I work with file '.git/info/exclude' too late?

Specifically, to ignore a file, you need to actually use the command git remove. See git rm (http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-rm.html)

You test it by going

git rm --dry-run *.log

(if you, say, wanted to exclude all the log files)

This will output what would be excluded if you ran it.

Then you run it by going

git rm *.log

(or whatever filename path / expression you want to)

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0

The accepted answer uses the binary file detection hint [1] [2] from gitattributes(5) in order to avoid showing a diff for the files that get matched.

You can use Git pathspecs [3] if you want to just some-times ignore certain files according to a pattern:

git diff ... -- ':^Project.xcodeproj/*'

Or the longform:

git diff ... -- ':(exclude)Project.xcodeproj/*'

Here I use single quotes (in Bash) to paranoia-avoid any expansion.

Git treats “the pattern as a shell glob suitable for consumption by fnmatch(3)”. [3]

Other commands

You should be able to use pathspecs on any command that takes <path>. You can for example git-grep(1) on all files in the Git project while excluding the translation directory, the documentation directory, and the test directory:

git grep 'cannot open directory' -- :^po :^Documentation :^t

Notes

  1. git version 2.50.0.rc0.46.g7014b55638d
  2. Or it just coincides with it
  3. gitglossary(7)
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