Re: [PATCH 2/2] filter-branch: fail gracefully when a filter fails

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 6, 2007, 08:33 UTC
Message-ID: <7vir8yextt.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <863b02j6qs.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Instead of "grep ." one could also do something like
>
> if read line then
>   while echo "$line" && read line; do :; done
>   die
> fi
>
> which is fork-less.

I'd agree with you that "grep ^" would be preferable _if_ we were to do this. But in your fork-less example, you are assuming that (1) "read" does not molest what is read, (2) "echo" is built-in, and (3) "echo" does not munge the parameter.

Since I am one of old fashioned shell people (I readily admit that I used to have _fun_ with autoconf generated shell scripts), I'd love to continue shell skill show-offs, but for the purpose of updating this script, I would say a temporary file is much better than any of the alternatives around 1>&3. For one thing, it would make debugging the script while developing and tweaking it, _and_ while using it, much more pleasant.