Count number of files deleted between Git commits

To count the number of files deleted between two Git commits, use the following command:

$ git log --diff-filter=D --summary 45b0487..HEAD | grep 'delete mode' | wc -l

Be sure to change 45b0487 to the commit you want to count from, or remove 45b0487..HEAD altogether to look through the entire history.

We use grep to count the number of deleted files.

$ git log --diff-filter=D --summary | grep 'delete mode'

delete mode 100644 test (3).txt
delete mode 100644 test (4).txt
delete mode 100644 test (2).txt

Then we use wc -l to do a line count:

$ git log --diff-filter=D --summary | grep 'delete mode' | wc -l
      3

Sometimes you get whitespace back from wc -l, you can trim that with tr:

$ git log --diff-filter=D --summary | grep 'delete mode' | wc -l | tr -d ' '

3

This may take some time for larger repositories.