Git Diff Filenames Ignoring Whitespace

A colleague of mine asked me whether I knew how to compare 2 branches in Git outputting only the filenames, but ignoring files with only whitespace changes.

Taking inspiration from here, I tried:


git diff --ignore-space-at-eol -b -w --name-only

But I was quite surprised to see files which only had whitespace changes showing up in the output. So I suggested working around the strange Git behaviour like this:


git diff --ignore-space-at-eol -b -w | grep ^diff

Which filters the output of the full diff, giving lines like:


diff --git a/non-whitespace.txt b/non-whitespace.txt
diff --git a/non-whitespace2.txt b/non-whitespace2.txt


He further improved on this by removing the a/ b/ prefix and using awk to extract only the filename for each line:


git diff --ignore-space-at-eol -b -w --no-prefix | grep ^diff | awk '{print $3}'

Giving a nice output:

non-whitespace.txt
non-whitespace2.txt