Re: let git grep consider sub projects

From: Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 7, 2014, 19:12 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHYJk3Qrj3QfBK-MkcCS2AmyTz=AgCcruq7Df-YZKW24LMWTHg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq8ukrg2j2.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On 7 October 2014 20:25, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Olaf Hering <olaf@aepfle.de> writes:
>
>> How can I teach 'git grep $string' to also consider subprojects?
>>
>> The build system of xen.git clones 4 other trees into a directory in its
>> source tree during build. It would be nice if my 'git grep' searches
>> also in these cloned subdirs. Somehow there must be some knowledge
>> because 'git clean -dfx' leaves them alone, while 'git clean -dffx'
>> wipes everything.
>>
>> Olaf
>>
>> PS: Sometimes I miss a 'git clean -dfx --also-sub-repos' useful to
>> really clean everything before starting over.
>
> Is "submodule foreach" under-advertised or with less than adequate
> features?

It sounds like in these use cases, you would want the commands to run on all the submodules but also in the parent repo, am I wrong in thinking that git submodule foreach does only the former part? So you would either need to make a wrapper thing yourself or run the command twice.

In the first case with the git grep, I can also imagine that with some nontrivial patterns, having to quote the metacharacters not only once, but twice, can be a significant annoyance. Eg, first protect it from git submodule foreach parsing it, and then from the shell running the individual commands.

-- 
Mikael Magnusson