ls-files [Was: Re: Fwd: git status options feature suggestion]

Johannes> Which is good! As ls-files is listed as plumbing. Johannes> Users should not need to call ls-files,

That is a bug, then. ls-files is one of the more important user-level commands in git.

It is vastly more efficient than find(1) or a --recursive call to grep(1).

Searching through a repository to find which file(s) define or use some function, struct, class or similar is a common occurance. Or to find which dir(s) contain(s) file(s) matching a given regexp. Or a number of other uses. (Tags might be useful if one does a lot of searching in a given repo, but grep is quicker for infrequent searches and the tags utils do not support all file types.)

ls-files is definitely dual-use.

-JimC