Why does git diff sometimes list a file that has no changes?
git diff and other git operations is optimized so it does not even look at files whose status (size, modification time etc) on disk and in git’s index are different. This makes git diff extremely fast for small changes. If the file has been touched somehow, git diff has to look at the content of and compare it which is a much slower operation even when there is in fact no change. git diff lists the files as a reminder that it is not used optimally. Running git status will not only show status, but will also update the index with status for unchanged files disk making subsequent operations, not only diff, much faster. A typical case that causes many files to be listed by diff is running mass editing commands like perl -pi -e ‘…’.
