Comparing a folder with a git repository

Question

I have a folder now once exported from a git repository, and the git repository itself:

/
/now/
/repository.git/

I'd like to compare the files in now to the current state of the repository. While this is easily done with --git-dir=/repository.git and --work-tree=/now,

git --git-dir=/repository.git --work-tree=/now status

it is not so obvious to me, when now was a subfolder of the stuff in the git repository.

Is there a way, besides checking out the repository again and diffing the stuff to have git somehow compare the folder and the corresponding subfolder in the repository? (I know, that git is not centered around the idea of changes in single files, therefore I actually expect a well-informed no.)

Answer 1

You can populate a temporary index file with just the contents of the subdirectory of the repository and then diff the existing files against it.

diff-sub() { : usage: diff-sub repo treeish-in-repo external-dir
  (
    GIT_DIR="$1" GIT_WORK_TREE="$3"
    GIT_INDEX_FILE=/tmp/.git-index--now-sub.tmp
    if test -e "$GIT_INDEX_FILE"; then
      echo "already exists: $GIT_INDEX_FILE"
      exit 1
    fi
    export GIT_DIR GIT_INDEX_FILE GIT_WORK_TREE
    git read-tree "$2" &&
    git diff
    ec=$?
    rm -f "$GIT_INDEX_FILE"
    exit "$ec"
  )
}
: diff sub from master in /repository.git against /now
diff-sub /repository.git master:sub /now

Note: If you run other Git commands that compare against the normal, full tree (e.g. git status or git diff --cached instead of git diff), then you will see odd-looking results since both the index and the working tree only contain a portion of the normal, full tree.

Answer 2

You can recreate the directory structure leading to the subfolder and take advantage of the --relative option to commands such as diff and log (but not status). For example, if you have a checkout of sub/dir:

mkdir -p sub
mv now sub/dir
git --git-dir=/repository.git diff --relative=sub/dir