How can I calculate the number of lines changed between two commits in Git?

Question

Is there any easy way to calculate the number of lines changed between two commits in Git?

I know I can do a git diff, and count the lines, but this seems tedious. I'd also like to know how I can do this, including only my own commits in the line counts.

Answer 1

You want the --stat option of git diff, or if you're looking to parse this in a script, the --numstat option.

git diff --stat <commit-ish> <commit-ish>

--stat produces the human-readable output you're used to seeing after merges; --numstat produces a nice table layout that scripts can easily interpret.

I somehow missed that you were looking to do this on multiple commits at the same time - that's a task for git log. Ron DeVera touches on this, but you can actually do a lot more than what he mentions. Since git log internally calls the diff machinery in order to print requested information, you can give it any of the diff stat options - not just --shortstat. What you likely want to use is:

git log --author="Your name" --stat <commit1>..<commit2>

but you can use --numstat or --shortstat as well. git log can also select commits in a variety other ways - have a look at the documentation. You might be interested in things like --since (rather than specifying commit ranges, just select commits since last week) and --no-merges (merge commits don't actually introduce changes), as well as the pretty output options (--pretty=oneline, short, medium, full...).

Here's a one-liner to get total changes instead of per-commit changes from git log (change the commit selection options as desired - this is commits by you, from commit1 to commit2):

git log --numstat --pretty="%H" --author="Your Name" commit1..commit2 | awk 'NF==3 {plus+=$1; minus+=$2} END {printf("+%d, -%d\n", plus, minus)}'

(you have to let git log print some identifying information about the commit; I arbitrarily chose the hash, then used awk to only pick out the lines with three fields, which are the ones with the stat information)

Answer 2

git diff --shortstat

gives you just the number of lines changed and added. This only works with unstaged changes. To compare against a branch:

git diff --shortstat some-branch

Answer 3

For the lazy, use git log --stat.

Answer 4

git diff --stat commit1 commit2

EDIT: You have to specify the commits as well (without parameters it compares the working directory against the index). E.g.

git diff --stat HEAD^ HEAD

to compare the parent of HEAD with HEAD.

Answer 5

Short statistics about the last commit :

git diff --shortstat HEAD~1 HEAD

In my case, this gives me the following information:

 254 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 10773 deletions(-)

Insertions and deletions are affected lines.

Answer 6

I just solved this problem for myself, so I'll share what I came up with. Here's the end result:

> git summary --since=yesterday
total: 114 file changes, 13800 insertions(+) 638 deletions(-)

The underlying command looks like this:

git log --numstat --format="" "$@" | awk '{files += 1}{ins += $1}{del += $2} END{print "total: "files" files, "ins" insertions(+) "del" deletions(-)"}'

Note the $@ in the log command to pass on your arguments such as --author="Brian" or --since=yesterday.

Escaping the awk to put it into a git alias was messy, so instead, I put it into an executable script on my path (~/bin/git-stat-sum), then used the script in the alias in my .gitconfig:

[alias]
    summary = !git-stat-sum \"$@\"

And it works really well. One last thing to note is that file changes is the number of changes to files, not the number of unique files changed. That's what I was looking for, but it may not be what you expect.

Here's another example or two

git summary --author=brian
git summary master..dev
# combine them as you like
git summary --author=brian master..dev
git summary --all

Really, you should be able to replace any git log command with git summary.

Answer 7

Good one to summarize the year

git diff --shortstat <first commit number of the year> HEAD

get results 270 files changed, 19175 insertions(+), 1979 deletions(-)

Answer 8

Assuming that you want to compare all of your commits between abcd123 (the first commit) and wxyz789 (the last commit), inclusive:

git log wxyz789^..abcd123 --oneline --shortstat --author="Mike Surname"

This gives succinct output like:

abcd123 Made things better
 3 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 159 deletions(-)
wxyz789 Made things more betterer
 26 files changed, 53 insertions(+), 58 deletions(-)

Answer 9

Another way to get all change log in a specified period of time

git log --author="Tri Nguyen" --oneline --shortstat --before="2017-03-20" --after="2017-03-10"

Output:

2637cc736 Revert changed code
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
ba8d29402 Fix review
 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)

With a long output content, you can export to file for more readable

git log --author="Tri Nguyen" --oneline --shortstat --before="2017-03-20" --after="2017-03-10" > /mnt/MyChangeLog.txt

Answer 10

git log --numstat 

just gives you only the numbers

Answer 11

to get quickly how many files have been changed and lines added, just run.

git diff --shortstat HEAD

Answer 12

If you want to see the changes including the # of lines that changed between your branch and another branch,

git diff the_other_branch_name --stat

Answer 13

Though all above answers are correct, below one is handy to use if you need count of last many commits

below one is to get count of last 5 commits

git diff $(git log -5 --pretty=format:"%h" | tail -1) --shortstat

to get count of last 10 commits

git diff $(git log -10 --pretty=format:"%h" | tail -1) --shortstat

generic - change N with count of last many commits you need

git diff $(git log -N --pretty=format:"%h" | tail -1) --shortstat

to get count of all commits since start

git diff $(git log --pretty=format:"%h" | tail -1) --shortstat

Answer 14

I wanted to have the insertions and deletions go into the sum, in case someone else needs the same here goes:

# get the log      filter useless parts      calculate the sum    and print it
git log --numstat | grep -vE '^[^0-9]' | awk '{sum += $1 + $2} END {print sum}'

This is not as versatile as some of the other solutions (for example the one undefined posted), but gives just a bare number, which was nice for my use case

Answer 15

git diff --stat will double-count modified lines. If this is a problem for you, you can do this instead:

git diff | diffstat -Cm

This will give you the same output, except that it will [try to] differentiate between added+deleted lines and modified lines.

Answer 16

This command will compare local files with remote files

git diff --stat

Answer 17

If you want to check the number of insertions, deletions & commits, between two branches or commits.

using commit id's:

git log <commit-id>..<commit-id> --numstat --pretty="%H" --author="<author-name>" | awk 'NF==3 {added+=$1; deleted+=$2} NF==1 {commit++} END {printf("total lines added: +%d\ntotal lines deleted: -%d\ntotal commits: %d\n", added, deleted, commit)}'

using branches:

git log <parent-branch>..<child-branch> --numstat --pretty="%H" --author="<author-name>" | awk 'NF==3 {added+=$1; deleted+=$2} NF==1 {commit++} END {printf("total lines added: +%d\ntotal lines deleted: -%d\ntotal commits: %d\n", added, deleted, commit)}'

Example:

using commit id's:

git log c9344e0be05b8038c244a4e9a531a199b961699c..947d05662b3b418cfaaa576d1e9585912a4e52dc --numstat --pretty="%H" --author="Krishna Chaitanya Surapaneni" | awk 'NF==3 {added+=$1; deleted+=$2} NF==1 {commit++} END {printf("total lines added: +%d\ntotal lines deleted: -%d\ntotal commits: %d\n", added, deleted, commit)}'

output:-

total lines added: +91
total lines deleted: -3
total commits: 7

using branches:

git log main..v3.2.0 --numstat --pretty="%H" --author="Krishna Chaitanya Surapaneni" | awk 'NF==3 {added+=$1; deleted+=$2} NF==1 {commit++} END {printf("total lines added: +%d\ntotal lines deleted: -%d\ntotal commits: %d\n", added, deleted, commit)}'

output:-

total lines added: +23
total lines deleted: -3
total commits: 2

This repo -> https://github.com/kcsurapaneni/food-delivery-backend/tree/main has been used for the example.