When I use 'svn diff' from the command line, it prints out the lines that have changed but also the 3 unchanged lines before and after for context. I much prefer seeing only the changed lines with no context. I haven't been able to determine any command line options that will let me make it behave this way. Standard 'diff' and 'cvs diff' do what I want by default. Surely 'svn diff' can do this but I'm missing something. Anyone know how?
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4 Answers
After looking into the useful link given above by unwind, the short answer is that svn's built-in diff can't do what I want. You can tell it to use the standard external diff though and pass arg's to that to tell it that you want no context. I put the following alias in my .bashrc and all now works well if I use that instead:
alias svndiff='svn diff --diff-cmd=diff -x -U0'
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valid
-x is the extension parameter for svn diff, it causes the token immediately following, here -U0, to be passed to the diff command specified with --diff-cmd, here diff.The suggestion above still produces the context format, but with 0 lines of context. This is still not the traditional diff output from before subversion.
What works for me is: svn di --diff-cmd=diff -x --normal
The --normal option (in the diff that ships with OSX) gives the traditional format that some folks prefer.
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You could pipe the results of 'svn diff' to grep and write a regular expression to get what you want. For example, try this:
svn diff | grep "^[+-\]"
The above command gets you all lines that begin with a '+' or a '-' or a '\'. (You need the '\' if you want to see differences such as "\ No newline at the end of the file".)
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kamczak
This works fine if you want only the changed lines. However, it fails to output correct information about line numbers. E.g. with 3 lines of context before/after, "@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@" says line 24 was changed. With no context you'd see "@@ -24,1 +24,1 @@"
This thread seems to come to the conclusion that you should use an external diff command in order to control the amount of context.
I prefer unified diffs, so my fingers always type
svn diff -x -u
Which implies that an external (GNU diff) command is used, I think.
1 Comment
DaveBurns
Thanks for the useful link. Surprising to me that the built-in diff can't do what I want. Seems to me to violate the Unix principle of having the least output asked for. Using the -x -u commands gives me the same results as not. 'svn help diff' tell me that those are the defaults. Maybe you don't need to type the extra char's after all?