Hi Jack Adrian,
On 2015-09-24 23:09, Jack Adrian Zappa wrote:
> This is a weird one:
>
> [file-1 begin]
>
> abcd efg hijklmnop
>
> [file-1 end]
>
> [file-2 begin]
>
> blah blah blah
> /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
> abdc boo ya!
>
> [file-2 end]
>
> Do a diff between these and it won't find any difference.
>
> Same with the following two lines, each in a different file:
> sabc fed ghi jkl
> abc def ghi jkl
>
> I first noticed this on the command line git and then in VS2013. The
> original problem was like my first example. The files were much
> longer, but all that git would see is the addition of the line of
> ////..., but not the removal of the original line.
>
> I've tried some other simple file changes with similar results.
> Something seems to be definitely broken in git diff. :(
You might want to show your exact command-line invocation, i.e. the full information. I suspect that you missed the fact that `git diff a b` does not compare the file a to the file b, but instead it compares both a and b to what is recorded in the index. With one quirk: if the files a and b are not even recorded in the index, `git diff` will output nothing.
Now, the really confusing part for you was probably that your `file-2` *was* recorded in the index (maybe you made a backup copy with the extra file extension `.bak` or some such, and then called `git diff my-file.bak my-file` where `my-file` *actually is tracked by Git* but `my-file.bak` is not).
But `git diff` has so nice features that I wanted to use it myself to compare files or directories. That is why I introduced the `--no-index` option, years ago. And so I suspect that you called
git diff file-1 file-2
when you actually wanted to call
git diff --no-index file-1 file-2
Here is my shell session to verify that `git diff` works as designed:
```
me@work $ cat >file-1
abcd efg hijklmnop
me@work $ cat >file-2
blah blah blah
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
abdc boo ya!
me@work $ git diff --no-index file-1 file-2
diff --git a/file-1 b/file-2
index 80ea2bc..f7fd7eb 100644
--- a/file-1
+++ b/file-2
@@ -1,3 +1,5 @@
-abcd efg hijklmnop
+blah blah blah
+/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
+abdc boo ya!
me@work $
```
Please note that I ended the file contents for both `cat` calls [*1*] with a `Ctrl+D` which you cannot see in the pasted lines.
Ciao,
Johannes
Footnote *1*: Can you believe that I wanted to make that pun for at least ten years now?
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