Re: Suggestion: git status --untracked

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 11, 2008, 10:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20080211102359.GA5916@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <b77c1dce0802110146o708e26a7lef56683f6b823365@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 10:46:25AM +0100, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:

> I find myself wanting sometimes to filter out the output of
> git-status, to feed it to another command (for example, git-add, or
> rm, or cat >> .gitignore). However it's not currently very easy to
> parse in a one-liner.

Here's a one-liner:

  git status | sed -ne '/^# Untracked/,${s/#\t//p}'

Unfortunately it is both specific to GNU sed as well as horribly unreadable.

> I'm suggesting to add options to control this behaviour. My suggestion
> would be (for a start) to add an option --untracked that will list all
> untracked files on stdout, without a leading "#\t", and without
> listing the added / modified / removed files.

The problem you are running into is that "git status" has a specific purpose: generating the commit message template. Fortunately, it is built on top of plumbing that is much easier to parse:

  git ls-files -o --exclude-standard

should produce the results you want. It even has a '-z' option to do things safely in the face of filenames with newlines, and can limit itself to partial paths.

-Peff