Re: is there a stylistic preference for a trailing "--" on a command?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 11, 2017, 15:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20171111151907.owrbpnn35aepj4ha@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAGZ79kavxFA_wBzcSbR8LT4uZGkdv4c07ZMfE4TK0tkooMGg6Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 10:12:39AM -0800, Stefan Beller wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 5:57 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> >
> >   just noticed these examples in "man git-bisect":
> >
> > EXAMPLES
> >   $ git bisect start HEAD v1.2 --      # HEAD is bad, v1.2 is good
> >   ...
> >   $ git bisect start HEAD origin --    # HEAD is bad, origin is good
> >   ...
> >   $ git bisect start HEAD HEAD~10 --   # culprit is among the last 10
> >
> > is there some rationale or stylistic significance to those trailing
> > "--" on those commands? i assume they have no effect, just curious as
> > to why they're there.
> 
> By having the -- there, it is clear that the strings are ref specs and not files
> of such a name. (Who would want to store a file named HEAD~10 in their
> repo?)

Just to be explicit, that makes it not just clear to the user but clear to Git. Without a "--" there heuristics that kick in. The first section of the "gitcli" manpage talks about this, though I don't know that we explicitly document the heuristics anywhere (and I think that is intentional -- we promise only to try to do what you meant, and scripts that want exact behavior should use a disambiguating "--").

-Peff