Re: [PATCH] archive: Refuse to write the archive to a terminal.

From: Reece Dunn <msclrhd@googlemail.com>
Date: Sep 16, 2009, 11:48 UTC
Message-ID: <3f4fd2640909160448x1fbb7a64s1ce0adca2af5010@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <237967ef0909160427m4d7de120tf5ef3176f75123ad@mail.gmail.com>

2009/9/16 Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>:

Show 9 quoted lines

> 2009/9/16 Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>:
>> Josh Triplett schrieb:
>>> I considered adding a -f/--force option, like gzip has, but writing an
>>> archive to a tty seems like a sufficiently insane use case that I'll let
>>> whoever actually needs that write the patch for it. ;)
>>
>> How about '--output -' instead?
>
> You could always just add '|cat'.

Except when running on Windows. Yes MSYS and cygwin provide a version of cat, but this cannot be guaranteed (e.g. with the series to support building with MSVC).

The `--output -` / `-o -` syntax looks reasonable (the issue with using -f/--force is: what are you forcing the operation of?). Is - used elsewhere in git for specifying stdout?

Also, the die message might be more useful (and in keeping with the other git commands) by showing the 'inline context help'; something like:

    Failed to generate the archive: output is a terminal.
    Please specify the file to write to (using `-o archive.tar`) or
redirect the output (e.g. `... | gzip`).
    If you want to write the archive out to the terminal, use `-o -`
to force the operation.

- Reece