Re: [PATCH] git-completion.bash: always swallow error output of for-each-ref

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 12, 2016, 20:10 UTC
Message-ID: <20160212201002.GA21598@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqsi0xu2ac.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 12:00:43PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> > Anyway, I this is a reasonable workaround. Errors from bash completion
> > scripts are almost always going to be useless and get in the way of
> > reading your own prompt.
> 
> I think that is absolutely the right stance to take, but then I
> wonder if it is a sensible execution to sprinkle 2>/dev/null
> everywhere.
> 
> For example, couldn't we do something like this instead?
> 
> This is just for illustration and does not remove all 2>/dev/null
> and replace them with a single redirection that covers the entire
> shell function body, but something along this line smells a lot more
> pleasant.  I dunno.

I agree it's a lot more pleasant, assuming there are no cases where we would want to pass through an error. But I really cannot think of one. Even explosive "woah, your git repo is totally corrupted" messages probably should be suppressed in the prompt.

Show 6 quoted lines

> @@ -320,7 +320,7 @@ __git_heads ()
>  			refs/heads
>  		return
>  	fi
> -}
> +} 2>/dev/null

Today I learned about yet another fun corner of POSIX shell.

-Peff