From: Lasse Makholm <lasse.makholm@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 10:38:06 GMT
Subject: Re: Weird behavior of shell variables in git aliases
Message-ID: <AANLkTimH+eVUh6D5qK-PbNJGg46XJwaCii5zMg7xyZ_6@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v4o6wnlxm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 21 March 2011 23:33, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>> Oh, I should have been paying a bit more attention.  I've been assuming
>> that we were turning "!anything" into { "sh", "-c", "anything", "-" }
>> followed by the user supplied arguments.
>
> The attached quick hack gives
>
>  $ git config alias.silly
>  !echo hello $1; echo $# args, bye!
>  $ GIT_TRACE=1 ./git silly world funny
>  trace: exec: 'git-silly' 'world' 'funny'
>  trace: run_command: 'git-silly' 'world' 'funny'
>  trace: run_command: 'sh' '-c' 'echo hello $1; echo $# args, bye'\!'' '-' 'world' 'funny'
>  trace: exec: 'sh' '-c' 'echo hello $1; echo $# args, bye'\!''
>  '-' 'world' 'funny'
>  hello world
>  2 args, bye!

That would IMHO be The Right Way to do it. Since the documentation for
aliases promises to to pass my alias to a shell if I prefix it with
"!", I shouldn't have to add the "sh -c ... -" myself...

> but it would penalize a properly written alias that uses "sh -c <it> -"
> trick itself by double forking, which is not very nice and I am unhappy
> about.

A properly written alias that uses a trick? I guess that sums up the
problem... :-)

Anyway, doesn't the existing way potentially break when passing funky
arguments containing spaces/quotes/something? We currently pass the
arguments to the alias command as a single quoted string. Passing them
as seperate elements on argv seems a lot more robust...

Do we risk breaking any existing "!sh -c ... -" aliases by applying this?

/Lasse