Re: Getting path to a file from arbitrary project directory

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 23, 2023, 09:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20230623094525.GA4204@szeder.dev>
In-Reply-To: <21c8396c1441dd4f74cd2097ac970a2033b81da4.camel@yandex.ru>

On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 11:52:58AM +0300, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:

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> (please keep me CC'ed, I'm not subscribed)
> 
> Hello! I'm trying to solve a simple problem: while I am inside an arbitrary project directory, I want to get a path to a file `filename.c` located elsewhere in the same project.¹
> 
> One way to implement that is with a command chain:
> 
> 	cd $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel) && git ls-files --full-name -- "*filename.c"
> 
> But it is pretty clunky, because that requires you to modify state (changing current directory). It may not matter though, but I'm just wondering if there's a better way to do that, something like `git ls-files --top -- …`, or anything like that? Haven't found nothing similar in `man git-ls-files`.

When a command expects pathspecs as arguments, then in general the leading ':/' magic means the root of the working tree (not sure where it is documented, though), i.e. you could try this:

  git ls-files --full-name ':/*filename.c'

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> As a separate note, this doesn't work:
> 
> 	ls-files --full-name -- $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"*filename.c"
> 
> 1: the usecase is I have a Emacs helper function to pick up a an aribtrarily mangled path to a file in the project from the primary clipboard and open that file. It's often "mangled", because gdb prints it with `../`, then logs print no path whatsoever, just a filename… So it's generally useful to have.