Re: #178 parsing of pretty=format:"%an %ad" causes fatal: bad revision '%ad'

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: May 2, 2014, 17:22 UTC
Message-ID: <20140502172256.GH9218@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <BLU0-SMTP1116609FAC7E0C76123F929F430@phx.gbl>

Hi Dave,

Dave Bradley wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> G:\ws_test_env\GIT_TESTBED_TMP\fest-swing-1.x>git log --all --pretty=format:"%an %ad" -- pom.xml
> xxxx xxxx Mon Nov 23 03:09:17 2009 +0000
> xxxx xxxx Mon Nov 23 02:42:24 2009 +0000
>
> G:\ws_test_env\GIT_TESTBED_TMP\fest-swing-1.x>git log --all "--pretty=format:"%an %ad"" -- pom.xml
> fatal: bad revision '%ad'

On Linux, this example gets passed to git as six arguments:

	log
	--all
	--pretty=format:%an
	%ad
	--
	pom.xml

I think the intent was instead to pass five arguments (the third being '--pretty=format:%an %ad'). That means you shouldn't unquote before the space, or in other words that the space should be part of a quoted argument.

On Windows, I believe the argument passing convention is more complicated. Programs can inspect the entire command line if they want to. But there's still an ambiguity in the command you passed: if I look at space-separated or double-quoted parts of the command line, it looks like

	git
	log
	--all
	"--pretty=format:"
	(no space)
	%an
	%ad
	(no space)
	""
	--
	pom.xml

What's the right way to parse this? How can git tell whether %an %ad were meant to be separate arguments or not? In absence of a stronger convention I suspect the simplest rule is to mimic what a Unix shell does, where they are separate arguments because the space is not quoted.

Cc-ing Windows folks in case they have more insight.

Thanks and hope that helps, Jonathan