Re: [PATCH 4/4] cat-file: support --textconv/--filters in batch mode

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 19, 2016, 14:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20160819144422.kkbskkthozfwfezp@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1608191450500.4924@virtualbox>

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 02:59:32PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > The only thing that somewhat is worrysome is what would happen to
> > %(rest).
> 
> What would happen is that it would print out the path, as it is exactly
> that "rest" field that is used in the implementation, piggybacking on that
> very nice feature.

Good, that is what I would expect to happen.

> Of course, this means that you simply cannot send "SHA-1 path rest" to
> cat-file --batch and expect that to work. Should anybody need that in the
> future, they can give it a try themselves to patch cat-file.

Right. The real motivation for %(rest) was to accept "git rev-list --objects" format, so you can do stuff like:

  git rev-list --objects --all |
  git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectsize) %(rest)' |
  sort -rn |
  head

to get the paths of the largest objects. So the fact that "%(rest)" will be the filename in this case is almost certainly the most useful default (and if somebody really wants something else, they can try to figure out other semantics later).

-Peff