Git: Finding Exact Line Numbers Changed in Recent Commits
Git, Sometimes you need more than just a list of changed files, you need to know exactly which lines were modified.
how to use Git and AWK to extract precise line ranges from the last 5 commits.
git diff HEAD~5..HEAD -U0 | awk '
/^\+\+\+ b\// { file = substr($0, 7) }
/^@@/ {
gsub(/.*\+/, "", $3);
gsub(/[^0-9,].*/, "", $3);
split($3, a, ",");
start = a[1];
count = (a[2] ? a[2] : 1);
end = start + count - 1;
print file ": " start "-" end
}'
output will be something like:
src/auth.js: 45-47
src/user.js: 123-123
README.md: 89-95
package.json: 12-15
If you don’t want certain files in the output, you can pipe grep exclusion.
git diff HEAD~4..HEAD -U0 | awk '
/^\+\+\+ b\// { file = substr($0, 7) }
/^@@/ {
gsub(/.*\+/, "", $3);
gsub(/[^0-9,].*/, "", $3);
split($3, a, ",");
start = a[1];
count = (a[2] ? a[2] : 1);
end = start + count - 1;
print file ": " start "-" end
}' | grep -vE "generated"
06. Jun 2025