Re: missing git documentation for "git clone --recursive"

From: D. Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2026, 22:03 UTC
Message-ID: <CALnO6CCMPCMdhMoei=bPSWC47n=+Uw_qP3joX8DPitUTcwNyaA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <ae4cb197-1edc-44c4-afbb-bbb24df509e8@web.de>

On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 3:35 PM <markusd112@web.de> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

>
> Hi,
>
> I am missing the argument "--recursive" for the git clone command in the
> git-clone documentation
>
> https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone
>
> Is this --recursive argument outdated? In some projects there is the
> following command in the documentation that clones the repository
> including init and update submodules:
>
> git clone --recursive (url)
>
> In the git documentation only "--recurse-submodules" is mentioned as
> allowed argument, but not "--recursive".
>
> Thanks
>
> Markus

The latter is a (now-undocumented) alias for the former. See 5c387428f1 (parse-options: don't emit "ambiguous option" for aliases, 2019-04-29) and referenced commits (like ccdd3da652 (clone: Add the --recurse-submodules option as alias for --recursive, 2010-11-04)) for some details.

-- 
D. Ben Knoble