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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

I've always found the git CLI really odd. For example, when doing a git diff, how would anyone use the following information that gets printed out?

new file mode 100644

index 0000000..cfbc74a

And you have all of these symbols that show up in the diff like "+[m" before a new line (why not just +?). I imagine there are good reasons for all of this, but I also feel like some of this should be hidden behind a --verbose flag or something.

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Because git-diff produces a full patch [1] that can be applied to a file. It's a lot more than just showing lines added/lines removed. The two hashes are useful because it shows what two objects are being compared. It's the same as saying "Change #12 vs Change #13" (not really, but sorta).

[1]: http://linux.die.net/man/1/patch

So the use case is primarily to produce something machine readable rather than human readable (it's not that unreadable, but still). I can see that. Is there a human-readable flag?

Do you mean you get '+[m' instead of '+' in front of an added line? If so, this looks suspiciously like ecma formatting escapes (\e[XXXm).

Try if calling git diff --no-color, if this helps then something is broken on your setup. Another way i could see that happening is if you have color set to 'always' and then use some app that wraps git's command line output.

j2kun means the stuff that shows up from TFA when using git diff:

  diff --git a/octocat.txt b/octocat.txt
  index 7d8d808..e725ef6 100644
  --- a/octocat.txt
  +++ b/octocat.txt
  @@ -1 +1 @@
  -A Tale of Two Octocats
  +[mA Tale of Two Octocats and an Octodog

phaker is correct, that's just an escape sequence that the JS terminal didn't handle (or handled incorrectly). Using --no-color you get:

    diff --git a/octocat.txt b/octocat.txt
    index 7d8d808..e725ef6 100644
    --- a/octocat.txt
    +++ b/octocat.txt
    @@ -1 +1 @@
    -A Tale of Two Octocats
    +A Tale of Two Octocats and an Octodog

Having git emit, by default, a diff that can't reliably be used by git to patch another repository seems ill advised.

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