Re: git diff vs git diff-files

From: Bernd Jendrissek <bernd.jendrissek@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 14, 2012, 13:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAF7PVPqZRjWv4Z=a21yf=_NXrWd4b5M3ROx=dLQ6MbNRFKt1dg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87393pztk4.fsf@thomas.inf.ethz.ch>

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Fun stuff.  This will be very interesting to debug.  It's still
> possible, though perhaps not extremely likely, that git is writing
> garbage to the terminal and it just happens to work for xterm.
>
> Whatever you do next, *please* post the *exact* file contents *and*

Hmm, this really isn't about git anymore, as I've reduced this problem to the following file:

0000000: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000010: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000020: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000030: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000040: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000050: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000060: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . . . . 0000070: 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a 200a . . . . . .

berndj@capybara:~/gaf.git$ nl /tmp/g
     2	
     3	
     4	
     5	
     6	
     7
[snip]
    60	
    61	
    62	
berndj@capybara:~/gaf.git$

Anything shorter than that causes first the command line (what you might call line 0, not the one you might call line 63, and yes, I do not that this is close to a binary round number), and after that, nothing to disappear.

strace confirms that gnome-terminal reads, but neglects to write, line 1.

I notice now that a second gnome-terminal tab in the same directory running the same commands reliably displays the correct output. I must have dumped an ELF file to the terminal at some point, or something similarly daft like that, and forgotten to reset the terminal. Not that I recall having done such a thing recently.

In any case, it's too late now; I ran reset(1) and the terminal is back behaving itself.

Thanks for helping me get (close to) the bottom of this. If git were to be guilty (which I very much doubt), the evidence is long gone now. I'll chalk this up to cosmic rays or something.