Q: supplying large sets of path to git commands

Some git commands like git check-attr supports receiving paths from
stdin. For other commands like "git diff" and "git commit --only" I
have not found a way to supply a lot of paths (say 1000). Is there a
standard way pass a additional paths to git commands that works on
windows and unix? It would be nice to have --stdin option for all
commands that might receive a set of paths. Or even better would
something like "--options-from-stdin" and
"--options-from-file=file.txt" as a possible last argument specified
on the command line.

Constantine