I recently received a request that I start a "Dear Jacob" advice column for git, and thought that it was a pretty nifty idea. I needed a good excuse to post more frequently, and I do end up answering a lot of questions about Git for the people that I know.

Welcome to the first installment of the "Dear Jacob" Git advice column!

The first tip comes about because of wanting to add all of the modified files to the index, without adding any test, or experimental files that might also be in your tree.

My first thought would be to try git add -a. Unfortunately, that doesn't work at all (even though -a is what you'd want if you were doing git commit in this case). With git add, you actually want -u.

Anyway, the disjunction resulted in the person doing git diff --name-only | xargs git add whenever they wanted to add only the modified files in their repo. They couldn't use git add . to add everything, since they potentially had some test/experiment files that they didn't want to track.