From: Junio C Hamano Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2022 22:52:19 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] builtin/show-ref.c: support `--count` for limiting output Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Taylor Blau writes: > This short patch series adds support for a new `--count` argument for limiting > the output of `show-ref` (à-la the `for-each-ref` option by the same name). It makes me wonder why we limit this to show-ref. $ git --pipe-to-head-N=3 any-command args... IOW, having to add an option like this feels absurd. > This is useful in contexts where a caller wants to avoid enumerating more > references than necessary (e.g., they only care whether a tag exists, but not > how many or what they are called) but doesn't have control of the output stream > (e.g., they are in Ruby and can't pipe the output to `head -n 1`). Are you saying that Ruby is incapable of run a command line like av[0] = "sh" av[1] = "-c" av[2] = "git show-ref blah | head -n 1" av[3] = NULL ?