Re: git grep doesn't follow symbolic link

From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Jan 10, 2012, 10:00 UTC
Message-ID: <877h0zlvwd.fsf@thomas.inf.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0=-LZH4MYhX50v-RWpGA2r+6q50YxsKaOxc0mJ__yuK7g@mail.gmail.com>

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Hi Bertrand,
>
> Bertrand BENOIT wrote:
>> When using git grep, symbolic links are not followed.
>> Is it a wanted behavior ?
>
> I'd imagine so: symbolic links are not portable across different file
> systems; Git's internal representation of a symbolic link is a file
> containing the path of the file to be linked to.

I'd actually welcome a fix to this general area, for an entirely different reason. With bash and ordinary diff I can do things like

  diff -u <(ls) <(cd elsewhere && ls) | less

But I lose all the cute features of git-diff.  I *could* say

  git diff --no-index <(ls) <(cd elsewhere && ls)

and it helpfully tells me

  diff --git 1/dev/fd/63 2/dev/fd/62
  index 55ccbe5..d796c45 120000
  --- 1/dev/fd/63
  +++ 2/dev/fd/62
  @@ -1 +1 @@
  -pipe:[607341]
  \ No newline at end of file
  +pipe:[607343]
  \ No newline at end of file

Of course that's diff and not grep, but I think they suffer from the same flaw: they share the file-kind handling logic of the rest of git in a case where it's not very helpful.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch