View permissions change in Git

git log --summary will get you what you're looking for, I think. The flag will, "Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes." Note the example below:

$ git log --summary
commit 8978a03a209d1cc4842a8ff14b00253cb7744895
Author: Me
Date:   Wed Feb 23 12:43:30 2011 -0500

    second

 mode change 100644 => 100755 matrix.cc

commit e559dcbee268448d4185854c056174dcb87d3013
Author: Me
Date:   Wed Feb 23 12:43:10 2011 -0500

    first

 create mode 100644 matrix.cc

Well, since the question has been edited to ask something different, here's a different answer:

git status -v will list mode changes as well as diffs. You can filter this down to just mode changes by running it through grep with a context filter: git status -v | grep '^old mode' -C 1 (sample result below)

diff --git a/matrix.cc b/matrix.cc
old mode 100644
new mode 100755