Re: Weird behavior of shell variables in git aliases

From: Lasse Makholm <lasse.makholm@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 22, 2011, 22:22 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinvP1TvhNBsN+Y3wyhzg+qampa6J=3NMfwr76a=@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20110322183201.GA22534@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On 22 March 2011 19:32, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

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> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:57:08AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> is no longer true; nobody sane would expect that if you made them realize
>> that "simply appended" already.  Just dropping that sentence would make
>> the resulting text flow much better.
>
> Agreed, your version is better.

Good points...

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>> I personally think the former "sh -c <str> -" is the more traditional and
>> well understood form (iow, an idiom) for people who breathe shells.
>
> Yeah, that is probably true. One advantage of the function idiom is that
> it doesn't happen inside single-quotes, so it's one less layer of
> quoting to deal with. And of course it saves a shell invocation. So I
> think mentioning both is reasonable.

As one of those shell-breathing people I prefer the function-style for its lack of quotes:

git config alias.foo = !foo () { echo $# args: $1, $2 and $3; }; foo

Whlie we're at it, is "sh -c ... -" and "sh -c ... --" equally portable, I wonder?

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>> > +----------------------
>> > +alias.foo = !echo $# args: $1, $2 and $3
>> > +----------------------
>>
>> While I totally agree with the formatting advice you gave here, we may
>> want to avoid this notation; neither "git config alias.foo = !echo ..."
>> nor writing "alias.foo = ..."  in .git/config file would work.
>
> Yeah, I didn't even think about that, but you are right.

Good point, I was wondering about that but decided to take my clue from existing examples of the same notation...

Right, I'll sleep() on it and cook a patch tomorow, attempting to take all of the above into account...

-- 
/Lasse