Dinesh on Java

Categories: GitHub

Difference between “git add -A” and “git add .” & “git add -u”

Millions of developers use GitHub to build personal projects, support their businesses, and work together on open source technologies. Git is very popular repository server. There are lots of command for git lets see difference between git add -A, git add . and git add -u .

According to git version 1.x

“git add -A” is equivalent to “git add .” and “git add -u“

git add -A stages All
git add . stages new and modified, without deleted
git add -u stages modified and deleted, without new

The important point about git add . is that it looks at the working tree and adds all those paths to the staged changes if they are either changed or are new and not ignored, it does not stage any ‘rm’ actions.

git add -u looks at all the already tracked files and stages the changes to those files if they are different or if they have been removed. It does not add any new files, it only stages changes to already tracked files.

git add -A is a handy shortcut for doing both.

git add -A is equivalent to git add –all
git add -u is equivalent to git add –update

According to git version 2.x

git add -A stages All
git add . stages All in same path
git add -u stages modified and deleted, without new

There is no more difference in 2.0. git add . equals to git add -A for the same path, the only difference is if there are new files in other paths of the tree.

With Git 2.0, git add -A is default: git add . equals git add -A .

Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!