I have just performed add --interactive, so the index version of some files is different than the working-directory versions. Instead of doing diff --cached, I want to actually dump the contents of each file in the index, but I can't find a command to do that. I should think that there would be something like "git show INDEX:filename...", but "INDEX" is not a valid object name.

I was able to do git ls --cached, then git show , but there should be a more straightforward method to see what you are committing.