Thanks for the reply. My immediate concern is not to fix the documentation but to get some sort of status or diff. I want to avoid using an index because I want to allow multiple processes to do different diffs at the same time. Right now I can put trees into the repo and get trees out without using the index but I had to write routines that use the lower level commands. If I could use the index it would be a couple of out of the box commands and I wouldn't have to write my own routine. While I've already written ones for "git add" and "git checkout" I'm trying to avoid writing one for "git diff" I looks like this is unavoidable. Oh well... thanks for the help. On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Eric Frederich <eric.frederich@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> This is from "git help diff". It seems to imply that I should be able to do it. >> It mentions nothing of the index. > > Most of the documentation on early subcommands (and "git diff" > certainly is one of the early subcommands) were written back when > everybody knew that Git almost always talks about _tracked_ files > that are known to the index, and the only time it even cares about > untracked ones that are not in the index was when it tries to help > users by reminding what the user may have forgot to "git add". > > Documentation pages do not bother repeating "this only looks at > tracked paths" for this reason; Git is about tracked files by > default. > > Perhaps you can suggest how to improve the description of commands > without being too repetitive? > > Thanks. -- 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