Paul MackerrasCurrently, if git-rev-parse encounters an argument that is neither a recognizable revision name nor the name of an existing file or directory, and it hasn't encountered a "--" argument, it prints an error message saying "No such file or directory". This can be confusing for users, including users of programs such as gitk that use git-rev-parse, who may then think that they can't ask about the history of files that no longer exist.
This makes it print a better error message, one that points out the ambiguity and tells the user what to do to fix it.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> ---
Show changes to rev-parse.c +10 −2
diff --git a/rev-parse.c b/rev-parse.c index e956cd5..7f66ae2 100644 --- a/rev-parse.c +++ b/rev-parse.c @@ -160,6 +160,14 @@ static int show_file(const char *arg) return 0; } +static void die_badfile(const char *arg) +{ + if (errno != ENOENT) + die("'%s': %s", arg, strerror(errno)); + die("'%s' is ambiguous - revision name or file/directory name?\n" + "Please put '--' before the list of filenames.", arg); +} + int main(int argc, char **argv) { int i, as_is = 0, verify = 0; @@ -176,7 +184,7 @@ int main(int argc, char **argv) if (as_is) { if (show_file(arg) && as_is < 2) if (lstat(arg, &st) < 0) - die("'%s': %s", arg, strerror(errno)); + die_badfile(arg); continue; } if (!strcmp(arg,"-n")) { @@ -343,7 +351,7 @@ int main(int argc, char **argv) if (verify) die("Needed a single revision"); if (lstat(arg, &st) < 0) - die("'%s': %s", arg, strerror(errno)); + die_badfile(arg); } show_default(); if (verify && revs_count != 1)