git-commit-vandalism/Documentation/git-diff-helper.txt
Junio C Hamano 52e9578985 [PATCH] Introducing software archaeologist's tool "pickaxe".
This steals the "pickaxe" feature from JIT and make it available
to the bare Plumbing layer.  From the command line, the user
gives a string he is intersted in.

Using the diff-core infrastructure previously introduced, it
filters the differences to limit the output only to the diffs
between <src> and <dst> where the string appears only in one but
not in the other.  For example:

 $ ./git-rev-list HEAD | ./git-diff-tree -Sdiff-tree-helper --stdin -M

would show the diffs that touch the string "diff-tree-helper".

In real software-archaeologist application, you would typically
look for a few to several lines of code and see where that code
came from.

The "pickaxe" module runs after "rename/copy detection" module,
so it even crosses the file rename boundary, as the above
example demonstrates.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-05-21 09:58:03 -07:00

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git-diff-helper(1)
==================
v0.1, May 2005
NAME
----
git-diff-helper - Generates patch format output for git-diff-*
SYNOPSIS
--------
'git-diff-helper' [-z] [-R] [-M] [-C] [-S<string>]
DESCRIPTION
-----------
Reads output from "git-diff-cache", "git-diff-tree" and "git-diff-files" and
generates patch format output.
OPTIONS
-------
-z::
\0 line termination on input
-R::
Output diff in reverse. This is useful for displaying output from
"git-diff-cache" which always compares tree with cache or working
file. E.g.
git-diff-cache <tree> | git-diff-helper -R file.c
would show a diff to bring the working file back to what
is in the <tree>.
-M::
Detect renames.
-C::
Detect copies as well as renames.
-S<string>::
Look for differences that contains the change in <string>.
See Also
--------
The section on generating patches in link:git-diff-cache.html[git-diff-cache]
Author
------
Written by Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Documentation
--------------
Documentation by David Greaves, Junio C Hamano and the git-list <git@vger.kernel.org>.
GIT
---
Part of the link:git.html[git] suite