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Development Tools Git Basics Working With Remote Repositories Pushing and Pulling

Farnoosh Johnson
Farnoosh Johnson
7,887 Points
Posted by Farnoosh Johnson
Farnoosh Johnson
7,887 Points

when we make changes in a file, what is a different between staging and just commit the changes with -a -m "changes"

what is a different between: staging: $ git add file1 $ git commit -m "I made some changes"

and

$git commit -a -m "I made some changes"

1 Answer

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

When a file is first created, it is "untracked" by git. Git is aware of it, but it's never been checked in before.

So git add file1 $ git commit -m "I made some changes", first adds the file as the new file as tracked, and than commits it.

$git commit -a -m "I made some changes" is only going to grab modified files for the commit. Meaning files that have already been added to git before, and thus have a history in the git repo.

You can check this with git status. It will tell you which files are modified, and which are untracked. A shorthand to track all currently untracked files is git add -A (with a capital A).

So if you want to do a sweeping wide commit to cover everything it's git add -A, git commit -m "I made changes"