Re: Confusing error message

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

Phil Hord [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I messed something up during a rebase in a moved file (probably
because I had rename detection turned off).  So now I want to fix it.

I think I have the commit amended right, but to be sure I want to diff
the old file and the new file.

  $ git diff newfile HEAD^:oldfile
  fatal: Path 'oldfile' exists, but not 'oldfile'.
  Did you mean 'HEAD^:oldfile' aka 'HEAD^:./oldfile'?

You can feed two blob object names to "git diff", but I do not think
there is any provision to compare a blob object and a file in the
working tree.

Ah, actually we do have a bolted-on hack to allow you feeding a blob
and a file, but I think you still need to follow the command line
convention of subcommand name (=diff), any dashed options
(e.g. "-R"), any object names (=HEAD^:oldfile) and then finally
pathnames (e.g. "newfile").

Does "git diff -R HEAD^:oldfile newfile" work?