On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Jerome Lovy wrote: > > after having read tutorial1+2, I thought the following were more or less > synonyms: index ~ directory cache ~ staging area > > But then I discover that --cache and --staged are two different things, > notably when using ls-files. > > The documentation states indeed: > "--cached Show cached files in the output" > "--stage Show stage files in the output" That is indeed confusing. It shouldn't be "stage files". It should be "file stages". The "stage" of a file is something that is meaningful on merges. Normally all files are in "stage 0", which means that it's fully merged. So when you do git ls-files --stage you'll see a listing of all the files, with their file modes, SHA1's, "stage" and filename. And you'll basically always see "0" in the stage column. But if you have had a merge that didn't resolve automatically, you can see the same filename listed up to three times, with stages 1, 2 and 3 (a zero will never be combined with any other stage - you'll only see a zero alone). That just shows how that particular file came to be: a "stage 1" entry is the base branch version (the "common ancestor"), while stages 2 and 3 are the first and second branch respectively. > I'm a bit confused. Is maybe a "stage file" entry missing in the glossary? That term doesn't exist, so it shouldn't be in the glossary (or in any man-pages). But the "merge stage" _of_ a file is a real concept. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html