From: SZEDER Gábor Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 21:45:34 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 11/19] bash prompt: use bash builtins to find out current branch Message-ID: <20120509214534.GF6958@goldbirke> In-Reply-To: <7vehqtqc6d.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 02:25:46PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > SZEDER Gábor writes: > > > If the above is right, then we could check with bash builtins whether > > HEAD is a symbolic link, which is cheap, and stick to '$(git > > symbolic-ref HEAD)' if it is, or use bash builtins if it isn't, right? > > Sure. Alternatively, you could run "readlink" on it if that is available > built-in, and manipulate the result in string builtins, but that is a b/c > slow path anyway, so I wouldn't bother. OK, will do that then. 'readlink' is not a bash builtin, so it would need the same number of fork()s and exec() as 'symbolic-ref'. Of course, the 'readlink' binary is much smaller than git and has less to do, so it might be a tiny bit faster, but for this rare corner case it really doesn't matter.