Re: suppress fatal pathspec errors from "git add"?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 3, 2010, 07:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20100103074058.GB23031@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <d7ac1a680912311324i85b7a5anadaf2ac13f215873@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 01:24:59PM -0800, aaron smith wrote:

> I'm looking through the add documentation, I don't see a way to
> suppress fatal pathspec errors? For example, if I'm adding 5 files,
> but one of them is mis-spelled, can I have git just supress the errors
> and add the other four?

Hmm. I would have thought "git add --ignore-errors" would do what you want, but it only ignores errors in reading the file. If we can't stat it, we will always die. IMHO that is an oversight in how "--ignore-errors" works (why should this one particular error be treated as fatal, when others are not?).

However, I have to wonder what your workflow is to really want this. If you do:

  $ ls
  foo bar baz
  $ git add foo bar bz
  fatal: pathspec 'bz' did not match any files

Then presumably your next command would be:

  $ git add foo bar baz

Using ignore-errors (if it worked), you would probably do:

  $ git add baz

Less typing, I suppose, but presumably you are using a shell that lets you just go back and edit the previous command line. I could see it if your workflow were something like "in a script, add these N files if they exist, but it is not an error if they don't". But I still don't think you would want to ignore all errors; you would want to do something like:

  $ git add $(for i in foo bar baz; do test -e $i && echo $i; done)

instead. Am I missing something?

-Peff