sapling/website/docs/commands/diff.md

sidebar_position
11

diff | d

show differences between commits

Show the differences between two commits. If only one commit is specified, show the differences between the specified commit and your working copy. If no commits are specified, show your pending changes.

Specify -c to see the changes in the specified commit relative to its parent.

By default, this command skips binary files. To override this behavior, specify -a to include binary files in the diff.

By default, diffs are shown using the unified diff format. Specify -g to generate diffs in the git extended diff format. For more information, see sl help diffs.

sl diff might generate unexpected results during merges because it defaults to comparing against your working copy's first parent commit if no commits are specified.

Examples:

• compare a file in the current working directory to its parent:

sl diff foo.c

• compare two historical versions of a directory, with rename info:

sl diff --git -r 5be761874:431ec8e07 lib/

• get change stats relative to the last change on some date:

sl diff --stat -r "date('may 2')"

• diff all newly-added files that contain a keyword:

sl diff "set:added() and grep(GNU)"

• compare a revision and its parents:

sl diff -c 340f3fef5              # compare against first parent
sl diff -r 340f3fef5^:340f3fef5   # same using revset syntax
sl diff -r 340f3fef5^2:340f3fef5  # compare against the second parent

Returns 0 on success.

arguments

shortname	fullname	default	description
-r	--rev		revision
-c	--change		change made by revision
-a	--text		treat all files as text
-g	--git		use git extended diff format
	--binary		generate binary diffs in git mode (default)
	--nodates		omit dates from diff headers
	--noprefix		omit a/ and b/ prefixes from filenames
-p	--show-function		show which function each change is in
	--reverse		produce a diff that undoes the changes
-w	--ignore-all-space		ignore white space when comparing lines
-b	--ignore-space-change		ignore changes in the amount of white space
-B	--ignore-blank-lines		ignore changes whose lines are all blank
-Z	--ignore-space-at-eol		ignore changes in whitespace at EOL
-U	--unified		number of lines of context to show
	--stat		output diffstat-style summary of changes
	--root		produce diffs relative to subdirectory
	--only-files-in-revs		only show changes for files modified in the requested revisions
-I	--include		include files matching the given patterns
-X	--exclude		exclude files matching the given patterns
-s	--sparse		only show changes in files in the sparse config