Re: Man pages lack of exit status information
- From
- David Mansfield <david@cobite.com>
- Date
- Apr 17, 2008, 17:38 UTC
- Message-ID
- <1208453892.16608.44.camel@gandalf.cobite.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <38b2ab8a0804170138u717fb753me45ead12720c9e3d@mail.gmail.com>
On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 10:38 +0200, Francis Moreau wrote:
Show 25 quoted lines
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> wrote: > > El 17/4/2008, a las 9:45, Francis Moreau escribió: > > > I checked on a couple of git commands' man pages and I couldn't find > > > the exit status of these commands. > > > > > > For example: git-status, git-diff man pages don't tell anything. > > > > > > Am I missing something ? > > > > > > > The "git-diff" man page documents this under the --exit-code option. It > > probably would be nice to have an "EXIT STATUS" section added to the man > > pages of those commands for which it would be interesting (like "git-diff") > > and perhaps to the main "git" man page as well (with general info). > > > > If there is interest in this I'll whip up a doc patch. > > > > I think it makes sense to have such section specially since git plumbings are > also designed to be used in higher level scripts. > > I really use to searching for RETURN VALUE section in man pages when I need > what a command returns. And it's a pain to have to read the whole man page for > finding such important information. >
+1 for adding a RETURN VALUE section to the docs.
Yes, please! We need this. I got burned because git-status does something which is non-intuitive, and just yesterday I was asking about git-merge, which I can only assume returns (exits) with 1 if there was a conflict.
David