From: Nikolai Weibull Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:58:07 GMT Subject: Re: git-check-ref-format returns 1 for valid branch names Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On 3/22/07, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > > "Nikolai Weibull" writes: > > > > > I'm obviously doing something wrong, but in git 1.5.0.4 > > > > > > % git check-ref-format abc > > > % echo $? > > > 1 > > > > > > What am I missing here? > > > > If you are trying to see if abc is a valid branch name, try refs/heads/abc. > > .. and before anybody wonders why it wants the "fully qualified" name, > it's because "abc" on its own is ambiguous. Is it a _tag_ called "abc", or > a branch, or what? That explains why - if you really want to verify a > ref-name, you need to give the full name.. > > On the other hand, if you don't care, and you just want "is this a valid > commit name", use > > sha1=$(git rev-parse --verify "$name"^0) || exit Thanks for the clarification. What I was after was a way to verify that a name is a valid new name of a branch, for the Zsh completion definition in the context of git-checkout -b . [1] After posting I realized that perhaps checking out the sources for git-checkout would enlighten me, which it did, as it uses git-check-ref-format "heads/$newbranch" to verify that the new branch's name is valid. [1] It's not really going to try to complete anything here, but verify that the new branch's name is valid while the user types it in. [2] [2] Hm, perhaps completing existing branch-names makes more sense, allowing the user to create a new branch-name based on an old one.