Re: git ls-files wildcard behavior considered harmful

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 31, 2015, 00:35 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8C9VdpN2MoNC7-ZuLAvjV5fUZVLzMM-gUzjj1ZQ5r9Vtg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20150330233614.GA17089@kitenet.net>

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 6:36 AM, Joey Hess <id@joeyh.name> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Duy Nguyen wrote:
>> You can do "git --literal-pathspecs ls-files ..." or set GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS.
>
> Thanks! --literal-pathspecs does allow getting around this.
>
> Now I'm wondering what other parts of plumbing might be doing globbing
> that I did not anticipate. Maybe I should set the environment variable
> so I don't need to worry about it..

We're just a bit sloppy in documentation. ls-files learned about wildcards since 56fc510 ([PATCH] git-ls-files: generalized pathspecs - 2005-08-21). Two months later, git-ls-files.txt is updated to say "<file>" (which is not entirely correct even if we ignore wildcards, ls-files can take directories as well). With latest git, I think only git-mv and git-read-tree go with plain paths. It's probably best to set GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS for scripting like Jeff said.

-- 
Duy