Re: git grep --no-index and absolute paths don't work?

From: Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn@elego.de>
Date: Oct 21, 2011, 07:09 UTC
Message-ID: <1319180973.5352.8.camel@bee.lab.cmartin.tk>
In-Reply-To: <CAKPyHN138OZRt_3PT5ChuTpSEuOdybnyAj8Baqr=3OD=y==jgw@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 2011-10-21 at 08:34 +0200, Bert Wesarg wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently  totally confused, that a
> 
>     git grep --no-index foo /usr/include
> 
> does not work. I know that the documentation says "in the current
> directory" for the --no-index flag. But this does not work ether:

The rest of the sentence reads ", not just those tracked by git" which implies that the files tracked by git are also searched. This requires a git repository.

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> 
>     cd ~; git grep --no-index foo ~/.bashrc
> 
> They all fail with 'is outside repository'. Which is for itself vary
> misleading, because I intentionally said --no-index.

Git is a tool that works on git repositories. Some commands may work outside of a repository, like ls-remote when given an URL or init (for obvious reasons) but it's not something that should be expected, especially for commands that read files from the working tree.

Why are you trying to use git's grep command outside a repository? Why isn't 'grep -nr foo /usr/include/' good enough?

cmn