Tracking Changes

Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How do I record changes in Git?

• How do I check the status of my version control repository?

• How do I record notes about what changes I made and why?

Objectives

• Go through the modify-add-commit cycle for one or more files.

• Explain where information is stored at each stage of that cycle.

• Distinguish between descriptive and non-descriptive commit messages.

Recall Bash Commands

First let’s make sure we’re still in the right directory. The first type of shell script we are using is called user input. So, we still need a subdirectory, user-input, inside of shell-scripts. Confirm you have ~/Desktop/shell-scripts/user-input and that it’s your working directory. If you are not inside ~/Desktop/shell-scripts/user-input, recall how to move to through directories and how to make a subdirectory.

Recall Bash Commands

Try to create an empty directory inside of shell-scripts called user-input.

Commands

To see what your working directory is:

$ pwd

To change directories:

$ cd ~/Desktop/shell-scripts

To create a directory, and then move to that directory:

$ mkdir user-input # user-input is a chosen name for our subdirectory
$ cd user-input

Let’s create a shell script file inside of ~desktop/shell-scripts/user-input that is called ui-example.sh that contains shell scripts using user input. We’ll use nano to edit the file; you can use whatever editor you like. In particular, this does not have to be the core.editor you set globally earlier. But remember, the bash command to create or edit a new file will depend on the editor you choose (it might not be nano). For a refresher on text editors, check out “Which Editor?” in The Unix Shell lesson.

$ nano ui-example.sh

Type the text below into the ui-example.sh file. Save the script; recall or discuss what each command does.

echo "What is your name?"
read name
echo "Hello $name."

Let’s first verify that the file was properly created by running the list command (ls):

$ ls

ui-example.sh

ui-example.sh contains some lines of code, which we can see by running:

$ cat ui-example.sh

echo "What is your name?"
read name
echo "Hello $name."

Run ui-example.sh using the bash command. What do you think the read command does?

If we check the status of our project again, Git tells us that it’s noticed the new file:

$ git status

On branch main

No commits yet

Untracked files:
   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

	ui-example.sh

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

The “untracked files” message means that there’s a file in the directory that Git isn’t keeping track of. We can tell Git to track a file using git add:

$ git add ui-example.sh

and then check that the right thing happened:

$ git status

On branch main

No commits yet

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

	new file:   ui-example.sh

Git now knows that it’s supposed to keep track of ui-example.sh, but it hasn’t recorded these changes as a commit yet. To get it to do that, we need to run one more command:

$ git commit -m "Adding in an example script on user input (commit #1)"

[main (root-commit) f22b25e] Adding in an example script on user input (commit #1)
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 ui-example.sh

When we run git commit, Git takes everything we have told it to save by using git add and stores a copy permanently inside the special .git directory. This permanent copy is called a commit (or revision) and its short identifier is f22b25e. Your commit may have another identifier.

We use the -m flag (for “message”) to record a short, descriptive, and specific comment that will help us remember later on what we did and why. If we just run git commit without the -m option, Git will launch nano (or whatever other editor we configured as core.editor) so that we can write a longer message.

Good commit messages start with a brief (<50 characters) statement about the changes made in the commit. Generally, the message should complete the sentence “If applied, this commit will” . If you want to go into more detail, add a blank line between the summary line and your additional notes. Use this additional space to explain why you made changes and/or what their impact will be.

If we run git status now:

$ git status

On branch main
nothing to commit, working directory clean

it tells us everything is up to date. If we want to know what we’ve done recently, we can ask Git to show us the project’s history using git log:

$ git log

commit 8d4f409759ab29069329922c15d51ebf856aa065
Author: user <user@ucsb.edu>
Date:   Thu Aug 22 09:51:46 2013 -0400

    Adding in an example script on user input (commit #1)

git log lists all commits made to a repository in reverse chronological order. The listing for each commit includes the commit’s full identifier (which starts with the same characters as the short identifier printed by the git commit command earlier), the commit’s author, when it was created, and the log message Git was given when the commit was created.

Where Are My Changes?

If we run ls at this point, we will still see just one file called ui-example.sh. That’s because Git saves information about files’ history in the special .git directory mentioned earlier so that our filesystem doesn’t become cluttered (and so that we can’t accidentally edit or delete an old version).

Now suppose let’s add a comment to ui-example.sh. (Again, we’ll edit with nano and then cat the file to show its contents; you may use a different editor, and don’t need to cat.)

$ nano ui-example.sh
$ cat ui-example.sh

# 'read' command requests user to input text
echo "What is your name?"
read name
echo "Hello $name."

When we run git status now, it tells us that a file it already knows about has been modified:

$ git status

On branch main
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

	modified:   ui-example.sh

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

The last line is the key phrase: “no changes added to commit”. We have changed this file, but we haven’t told Git we will want to save those changes (which we do with git add) nor have we saved them (which we do with git commit). So let’s do that now. It is good practice to always review our changes before saving them. We do this using git diff. This shows us the differences between the current state of the file and the most recently saved version:

$ git diff

diff --git a/user-input/ui-example.sh b/user-input/ui-example.sh
index b5c9f2a..6db94fd 100644
--- a/user-input/ui-example.sh
+++ b/user-input/ui-example.sh
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+#'read' command requests user to input text
 echo "What is your name?"
 read name
 echo "Hello $name."

The output is cryptic because it is actually a series of commands for tools like editors and patch telling them how to reconstruct one file given the other. If we break it down into pieces:

1. The first line tells us that Git is producing output similar to the Unix diff command comparing the old and new versions of the file.
2. The second line tells exactly which versions of the file Git is comparing; df0654a and 315bf3a are unique computer-generated labels for those versions.
3. The third and fourth lines once again show the name of the file being changed.
4. The remaining lines are the most interesting, they show us the actual differences and the lines on which they occur. In particular, the + marker in the first column shows where we added a line.

After reviewing our change, it’s time to commit it:

$ git commit -m "Add comment on what read command does (commit #2)"

On branch main
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

	modified:   ui-example.sh

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Whoops: Git won’t commit because we didn’t use git add first. Let’s fix that:

$ git add ui-example.sh
$ git commit -m "Add comment on what read command does (commit #2)"

[main 34961b1] Add comment on what `read` command does (commit #2)
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Git insists that we add files to the set we want to commit before actually committing anything. This allows us to commit our changes in stages and capture changes in logical portions rather than only large batches. For example, suppose we’re adding a few citations to relevant research to our thesis. We might want to commit those additions, and the corresponding bibliography entries, but not commit some of our work drafting the conclusion (which we haven’t finished yet).

To allow for this, Git has a special staging area where it keeps track of things that have been added to the current changeset but not yet committed.

Staging Area

If you think of Git as taking snapshots of changes over the life of a project, git add specifies what will go in a snapshot (putting things in the staging area), and git commit then actually takes the snapshot, and makes a permanent record of it (as a commit). If you don’t have anything staged when you type git commit, Git will prompt you to use git commit -a or git commit --all, which is kind of like gathering everyone to take a group photo! However, it’s almost always better to explicitly add things to the staging area, because you might commit changes you forgot you made. (Going back to the group photo simile, you might get an extra with incomplete makeup walking on the stage for the picture because you used -a!) Try to stage things manually, or you might find yourself searching for “git undo commit” more than you would like!

Let’s watch as our changes to a file move from our editor to the staging area and into long-term storage. First, move the comment to be placed below Hello $name. Add in more content to the comment.:

$ nano ui-example.sh
$ cat ui-example.sh

echo "What is your name?"
read name
echo "Hello $name."
#the read command requests user input, we use `$` to recall the variable established by `read`

$ git diff

diff --git a/user-input/ui-example.sh b/user-input/ui-example.sh
index 6db94fd..d586f12 100644
--- a/user-input/ui-example.sh
+++ b/user-input/ui-example.sh
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#'read' command requests user to input text
 echo "What is your name?"
 read name
 echo "Hello $name."
+#`read` command requests user input, we use `$` to recall the variable established by `read`

So far, so good: we’ve added one line to the end of the file (shown with a + in the first column). Now let’s put that change in the staging area and see what git diff reports:

$ git add ui-example.sh
$ git diff

There is no output: as far as Git can tell, there’s no difference between what it’s been asked to save permanently and what’s currently in the directory. However, if we do this:

$ git diff --staged

diff --git a/user-input/ui-example.sh b/user-input/ui-example.sh
index 6db94fd..d586f12 100644
--- a/user-input/ui-example.sh
+++ b/user-input/ui-example.sh
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#'read' command requests user to input text
 echo "What is your name?"
 read name
 echo "Hello $name."

it shows us the difference between the last committed change and what’s in the staging area. Let’s save our changes:

$ git commit -m "Adding more notes about read (commit #3)"

[main 005937f] "Adding more notes about read command (commit #3)"
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

check our status:

$ git status

On branch main
nothing to commit, working directory clean

and look at the history of what we’ve done so far:

$ git log

commit d2f536d6198f12ebba1849af49405a4f54845dd6 (HEAD -> main)
Author: user <user@ucsb.edu>
Date:   Thu Aug 22 10:14:07 2013 -0400

    Adding more notes about read command (commit #3)

commit b798ee602bd76b92c39d8c62c6637d36109365e4
Author: user <user@ucsb.edu>
Date:   Thu Aug 22 10:07:21 2013 -0400

    Add comment on what read command does (commit #2)

commit 8d4f409759ab29069329922c15d51ebf856aa065
Author: user <user@ucsb.edu>
Date:   Thu Aug 22 09:51:46 2013 -0400

    Adding in an example script on user input (commit #1)

Word-based diffing

Sometimes, e.g. in the case of the text documents a line-wise diff is too coarse. That is where the --color-words option of git diff comes in very useful as it highlights the changed words using colors.

Paging the Log

When the output of git log is too long to fit in your screen, git uses a program to split it into pages of the size of your screen. When this “pager” is called, you will notice that the last line in your screen is a :, instead of your usual prompt.

• To get out of the pager, press Q.
• To move to the next page, press Spacebar.
• To search for some_word in all pages, press / and type some_word. Navigate through matches pressing N.

Limit Log Size

To avoid having git log cover your entire terminal screen, you can limit the number of commits that Git lists by using -N, where N is the number of commits that you want to view. For example, if you only want information from the last commit you can use:

$ git log -1

commit 005937fbe2a98fb83f0ade869025dc2636b4dad5 (HEAD -> main)
Author: user <user@ucsb.edu>
Date:   Thu Aug 22 10:14:07 2013 -0400

   Adding more notes about read command (commit #3)

You can also reduce the quantity of information using the --oneline option:

$ git log --oneline

005937f (HEAD -> main) Adding more notes about read command (commit #3)
34961b1 Add comment on what `read` command does (commit #2)
f22b25e Adding in an example script on user input (commit #1)

You can also combine the --oneline option with others. One useful combination adds --graph to display the commit history as a text-based graph and to indicate which commits are associated with the current HEAD, the current branch main, or other Git references:

$ git log --oneline --graph

* 005937f (HEAD -> main) Adding more notes about read command (commit #3)
* 34961b1 Add comment on what `read` command does (commit #2)
* f22b25e Adding in an example script on user input (commit #1)

Directories in Git

Two important facts you should know about directories in Git:

1. Git does not track directories on their own, only files within them.
2. If you can create a directory in your Git repository and populate it with files, you can add all the files in the directory at once.

Create a new directory named ‘loops’ We will be using this directory in the following lessons so please follow along.

$ cd ..
$ mkdir loops
$ git status
$ git add loops
$ git status

Note, our newly created empty directory loops does not appear in the list of untracked files even if we explicitly add it (via git add) to our repository. This is the reason why you will sometimes see .gitkeep files in otherwise empty directories. Unlike .gitignore, these files are not special and their sole purpose is to populate a directory so that Git adds it to the repository. In fact, you can name such files anything you like.

Add multiple files to a directory at once.
Try adding a new for-loop.sh file into your new subdirectory

git add <directory-with-files>

Try it for yourself:

$ touch loops/for-loop.sh
$ git status
$ git add loops
$ git status

Before moving on, we will commit these changes.

$ git commit -m "Add in subdir for loops"
$ cd loops

To recap, when we want to add changes to our repository, we first need to add the changed files to the staging area (git add) and then commit the staged changes to the repository (git commit):

Committing Changes to Git

Which command(s) below would save the changes of myfile.txt to my local Git repository?

1. $ git commit -m "my recent changes"
   

2. $ git init myfile.txt
   $ git commit -m "my recent changes"
   

3. $ git add myfile.txt
   $ git commit -m "my recent changes"
   

4. $ git commit -m myfile.txt "my recent changes"
   

Solution

1. Would only create a commit if files have already been staged.
2. Would try to create a new repository.
3. Is correct: first add the file to the staging area, then commit.
4. Would try to commit a file “my recent changes” with the message myfile.txt.

Committing Multiple Files

The staging area can hold changes from any number of files that you want to commit as a single snapshot. The goals for the rest of this lesson are:

1. Add some text to for-loop.sh
2. Create a new file notes-for-loop.txt
3. Add changes from both files to the staging area, and commit those changes.

First we make our changes to the for-loop.sh` files:

$ nano for-loop.sh
$ cat for-loop.sh

# for-loop example
# this for loop outputs numbers

$ nano notes-for-loop.txt
$ cat notes-for-loop.txt

For loops start with `for` and ends with `done`.

Now you can add both files to the staging area. We can do that in one line:

$ git add for-loop.sh notes-for-loop.txt

Or with multiple commands:

$ git add for-loop.sh
$ git add notes-for-loop.txt

Now the files are ready to commit. You can check that using git status. If you are ready to commit use:

$ git commit -m "Add in for loop example"

[main 7f9e498] add in for loop example
2 files changed, 3 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 for-loop.sh
create mode 100644 notes-for-loop.txt

Add in and commit the script of the for-loop example. Think about how the structure of this for loop works.

# for-loop example
# this for loop outputs numbers

for variable in 1 2 3 4 5
do
  echo "output number $variable"
done

bio Repository

• Create a new Git repository on your computer called bio.
• Write a three-line biography for yourself in a file called me.txt, commit your changes
• Modify one line, add a fourth line
• Display the differences between its updated state and its original state.

Solution

If needed, move out of the shell-scripts folder:

$ cd ..

Create a new folder called bio and ‘move’ into it:

$ mkdir bio
$ cd bio

Initialise git:

$ git init

Create your biography file me.txt using nano or another text editor. Once in place, add and commit it to the repository:

$ git add me.txt
$ git commit -m "Add biography file"

Modify the file as described (modify one line, add a fourth line). To display the differences between its updated state and its original state, use git diff:

$ git diff me.txt

Key Points

• git status shows the status of a repository.

• Files can be stored in a project’s working directory (which users see), the staging area (where the next commit is being built up) and the local repository (where commits are permanently recorded).

• git add puts files in the staging area.

• git commit saves the staged content as a new commit in the local repository.

• Write a commit message that accurately describes your changes.