Reviewing changes
=================

Looking before you leap
-----------------------

Once you have completed some work, it's a good idea to review your changes
prior to permanently recording it. This way, you can make sure you'll be
committing what you intend to.

Two bzr commands are particularly useful here: **status** and **diff**.  

bzr status
----------

The **status** command tells you what changes have been made to the
working directory since the last revision::

    % bzr status
    modified:
       foo

``bzr status`` hides "boring" files that are either unchanged or ignored.
The status command can optionally be given the name of some files or
directories to check.

bzr diff
--------

The **diff** command shows the full text of changes to all files as a
standard unified diff.  This can be piped through many programs such as
''patch'', ''diffstat'', ''filterdiff'' and ''colordiff''::

    % bzr diff
    === added file 'hello.txt'
    --- hello.txt   1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000
    +++ hello.txt   2005-10-18 14:23:29 +0000
    @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
    +hello world


With the ``-r`` option, the tree is compared to an earlier revision, or
the differences between two versions are shown::

    % bzr diff -r 1000..          # everything since r1000
    % bzr diff -r 1000..1100      # changes from 1000 to 1100

The ``--diff-options`` option causes bzr to run the external diff program,
passing options.  For example::

    % bzr diff --diff-options --side-by-side foo

Some projects prefer patches to show a prefix at the start of the path
for old and new files.  The ``--prefix`` option can be used to provide
such a prefix.
As a shortcut, ``bzr diff -p1`` produces a form that works with the 
command ``patch -p1``.