Re: [PATCH] Add a -z option to 'git status' to safely feed shell programs with path names

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: May 17, 2008, 10:14 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0805171109000.30431@racer>
In-Reply-To: <20080517025133.GQ29038@spearce.org>

Hi,

On Fri, 16 May 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Sebastien Gross <seb-git@chezwam.org> wrote:
> > Add a -z option to 'git status' to get a list of all files
> > but ignored, starting with modification type or 'untracked'
> > as prefix and ending with '\0'.
> 
> Hmm.  Is the plumbing really that broken that you need to add -z support 
> to porcelain rather than using the -z support already built into the 
> plumbing?

To answer the retorical question: no, it is not. git ls-files already has the "-z" flag, and we even have the scripts in contrib/examples/ to prove that it works very fine, thankyouverymuch.

Just as an example: this ugly, long line

git status -z | gawk 'BEGIN{RS="\0"; ORS="\0";}/^untracked/ \
        {sub("^.+:", "");print}' | xargs -0 -r rm

could be expressed like this:

git ls-files --others -z | xargs -0 -r rm

I believe. If not, this should provide a good starting point, without changing Git at all!

> A very large and intrusive looking patch for what can already be 
> obtained easier through existing, stable porcelain.  Not something I am 
> in favor of seeing added at this time.

It is not only intrusive looking. It is sneaky: it changes git-commit at the same time, even if you would not begin to guess from the shortline.

It adds a function that is clearly path-related into quote.c!

And then, the commit message is quite different from the other commit messages in git.git, no?

Opposed to the patch, Dscho