suppress fatal pathspec errors from "git add"?

I'm looking through the add documentation, I don't see a way to suppress fatal pathspec errors? For example, if I'm adding 5 files, but one of them is mis-spelled, can I have git just supress the errors and add the other four? thanks much!

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 01:24:59PM -0800, aaron smith wrote:

Hmm. I would have thought "git add --ignore-errors" would do what you want, but it only ignores errors in reading the file. If we can't stat it, we will always die. IMHO that is an oversight in how "--ignore-errors" works (why should this one particular error be treated as fatal, when others are not?).

However, I have to wonder what your workflow is to really want this. If you do:

  $ ls
  foo bar baz
  $ git add foo bar bz
  fatal: pathspec 'bz' did not match any files

Then presumably your next command would be:

  $ git add foo bar baz

Using ignore-errors (if it worked), you would probably do:

  $ git add baz

Less typing, I suppose, but presumably you are using a shell that lets you just go back and edit the previous command line. I could see it if your workflow were something like "in a script, add these N files if they exist, but it is not an error if they don't". But I still don't think you would want to ignore all errors; you would want to do something like:

  $ git add $(for i in foo bar baz; do test -e $i && echo $i; done)

instead. Am I missing something?

-Peff

Hey Jeff, thanks for the reply.

Yeah you hit it right on the head, it would be useful to suppress the errors if you're running a script to add the files. I can certainly use that snippet u provided - thanks. It would even be useful in git if you could suppress the errors, or maybe have a switch to list out the files that failed, but add the ones that pass.. like "git add --ignore-errors --list-failures" something like that. Anyway, thanks for the input.

On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 11:40 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

If your primary activity that happens in the work tree were:

	while :
        do
        	file=$(date +"random-%H%M%S")
                >"$file"
                rm -f "$file"
	done

and your add were done in

	while sleep 3600
        do
		git add $(for i in *; do test -e $i && echo $i; done)
                git commit -m "hourly snapshot"
	done

totally asynchronously without coordinating with what the primary activity is doing, your "test -e && echo" can race with a concurrent "rm".

Even though I think it is an insane use pattern that we shouldn't bother to bend too much backwards to support it, --ignore-errors were added primarily for a similar use case (i.e. by the time we try to read it, it is either gone or it cannot be read by the user who runs "git add"), so in that sense it _might_ make sense to ignore all errors with the option. If we choose to go in that direction, it would also make tons of sense to update the documentation of the option to caution more strongly that its use is a sign of insanity and is discouraged at the same time.

On Sun, Jan 03, 2010 at 12:12:19AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Of course. But in such a situation, you are almost certainly better off doing "git add -A". The external loop is really only useful if you want to add a subset of the files that may or may not exist for some reason. Which is getting pretty specific and crazy.

I haven't checked to see whether "add -A" has a race in discovering files versus actually adding them (I suppose there has to be one...even if we open() immediately and use fstat() and friends for everything else, there still must be a race between getting the name from readdir() and calling open()).

And I can see that as a potentially useful workflow: you are doing regular snapshots of a set of files which are being changed by an outside force. You care about errors, but not files disappearing between readdir() and stat(). The "find" command has an "--ignore-readdir-race" option, which is what you would want.

But that is not "--ignore-errors should also ignore missing files". It is "I want to ignore missing files but not other errors".

I tracked down the original thread and it looks like the motivation was to handle repositories with a mixed set of readable and inaccessible (due to permissions) files:

 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/75676

So I think it's not _totally_ insane there. You would do "git add --ignore-errors ." instead of having to manually write the shell loop of accessible items (though personally, I think I would just write the shell loop in that situation).

That's just my two cents on the matter. I'm not personally planning on writing patches for either case.

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

I have thought that this is task for --ignore-missing / --missing-ok option, but this option(s) does not apply to git-add / git-rm; the former is from git-write-index, the latter form from git-write-tree.