Re: Strange behavior (possible bug) using bash command subsitution with "git branch"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 8, 2009, 23:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20091108230300.GB17129@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20091108224955.GA14095@atjola.homenet>

On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 11:49:55PM +0100, Björn Steinbrink wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> > I ran into a weird situation while working on a script, which is best
> > described with a little snippet from my gitosis-admin repository:
> > 
> >     $ git branch
> >     * master
>      ^^^
> 
> >     $ branch=$(git branch)
> >     $ echo $branch
> >     gitosis.conf keydir master
> 
> Your shell expands the *, thus echo sees all the things in the current
> directory. Use 'echo "$branch"' and you'll see what you expected.

And more to the point, this is just one reason why one should use for-each-ref when scripting (the other is that git-branch's output is considered porcelain, and is not guaranteed to remain stable). E.g.:

  git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads/

would produce the output the original poster wanted.

-Peff