How to make git log show file paths relative to current directory?

Question

The current Git-based project that I am working on, I am generally always in a sub-directory.

Below is the output when I run the command git log --name-only from a sub-directory of the root of the repository.

commit 678bd5ba6fc5474c4c61406768bf6cba5937c5d1
Author: thegreendroid
Date:   Mon Mar 27 09:36:24 2017 +1300

    Commit message

 child_dir1_from_root/file1                     |  184 +--
 child_dir2_from_root/file2                     |    2 +-

How do I instead get git log to output something like below instead? This makes diffing the files listed really easy, by just copying the file path and running git diff HEAD~ {copied_file_path} rather than having to modify the file path manually and then run the command.

commit 678bd5ba6fc5474c4c61406768bf6cba5937c5d1
Author: thegreendroid
Date:   Mon Mar 27 09:36:24 2017 +1300

    Commit message

 file1                                          |  184 +--
 ../child_dir2_from_root/file2                  |    2 +-

I have looked at the git log documentation, but nothing stood out. I can write a script to do this, but I was curious whether Git has a built-in way.

Exoenzyme

Answer 1

In order to use the paths in the output of git log --name-only, add the option --git-dir to git diff.

git --git-dir="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"/.git diff HEAD~ child_dir1_from_root/file1

For easy use, make an alias in the config.

[alias]
        mdiff = "! git --git-dir=\"$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)\"/.git diff"

git mdiff HEAD~ child_dir1_from_root/file1 now can work as long as the current directory belongs to the working tree.

Gormley

Beautiful! The alias method works fine, but directly running it on the command line throws an error (fatal: Not a git repository: '$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.git'). – Exoenzyme

Answer 2

You can add up the --relative='PATH' to the subdirectory you want.

Kymric

Well this appears to exclude changes apart from the specified directory, which is not what I want. – Exoenzyme