Re: Suggestion: git status --untracked

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 11, 2008, 10:56 UTC
Message-ID: <m3bq6ng3sb.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <b77c1dce0802110146o708e26a7lef56683f6b823365@mail.gmail.com>

"Rafael Garcia-Suarez" <rgarciasuarez@gmail.com> writes:

> I find myself wanting sometimes to filter out the output of
> git-status, to feed it to another command (for example, git-add, or
> rm, or cat >> .gitignore). However it's not currently very easy to
> parse in a one-liner.

Probably because git-status is porcelain, and is meant to be used by
end user, not in scripts.

Show 8 quoted lines

> I'm suggesting to add options to control this behaviour. My suggestion
> would be (for a start) to add an option --untracked that will list all
> untracked files on stdout, without a leading "#\t", and without
> listing the added / modified / removed files.
> 
> I'm willing to implement it, but I'd like to have some discussion
> about the interface first. Is that a good idea at all, and how could
> it be improved interface-wise?

To list all untracked files you can use plumbing command, namely "git ls-files --others" (Show other files in the output), or perhaps "git ls-files -o --directory --no-empty-directory --exclude-standard"

If you want to use git command in script, it is better to find appropriate plumbing command to do what you want, for example git-ls-files instead of git-status to list untracked files, git-symbolic-ref instead of git-branch to get current branch name, etc.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git