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"Git worktree list" on paths with newlines

Subject: "Git worktree list" on paths with newlines

## tl;dr

3 messages between Feb 25, 2022 and Feb 28, 2022.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Kang-Che Sung· Feb 25, 2022, 08:32 UTC · lore
Dear Git developers,

I'm not sure if this is a good place to ask a question about the Git worktree feature.

I'm writing a shell script that parses the "git worktree list --porcelain" format, and I've run into trouble on determining the end of the worktree path.

Consider a repository with a "test1" branch, and I create a worktree through a command like this:

$ git worktree add "$(printf 'directory\nHEAD\nbranch\n\nxyz')" test1

Git does allow me to create a worktree with newlines in its name (in a Unix file system, of course). After that, "git worktree list --porcelain" would show a somewhat tricked output, and it would break my parsing script.

(What my script does is find out what worktrees check out branches of a specific pattern, and remove the worktrees found )

I wish "git worktree list --porcelain" would show directory names with some quoting or escaping so that tricky names can be handled easily for any program that reads the porcelain output. But I didn't see any command line option that enables quoting or escaping of file names.

Does anyone have an idea on what I could do?
Junio C Hamano· Feb 25, 2022, 17:11 UTC · re: Kang-Che Sung · lore

Re: "Git worktree list" on paths with newlines

Kang-Che Sung <explorer09@gmail.com> writes:
Show 6 quoted lines
> I wish "git worktree list --porcelain" would show directory names with some
> quoting or escaping so that tricky names can be handled easily for any program
> that reads the porcelain output. But I didn't see any command line option that
> enables quoting or escaping of file names.
>
> Does anyone have an idea on what I could do?

I agree that an output mode that claims to be --porcelain should produce output that is machine-parseable without ambiguity.

The usual practice is to use quote_c_style() for output without "-z", and with "-z", just use the NUL as the termination character, as you shouldn't be listing strings with embedded NUL.

Eric Sunshine· Feb 28, 2022, 08:43 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: "Git worktree list" on paths with newlines

On Fri, Feb 25, 2022 at 3:47 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
Show 14 quoted lines
> Kang-Che Sung <explorer09@gmail.com> writes:
> > I wish "git worktree list --porcelain" would show directory names with some
> > quoting or escaping so that tricky names can be handled easily for any program
> > that reads the porcelain output. But I didn't see any command line option that
> > enables quoting or escaping of file names.
> >
> > Does anyone have an idea on what I could do?
>
> I agree that an output mode that claims to be --porcelain should
> produce output that is machine-parseable without ambiguity.
>
> The usual practice is to use quote_c_style() for output without
> "-z", and with "-z", just use the NUL as the termination character,
> as you shouldn't be listing strings with embedded NUL.
A couple additional comments...

Phillip has just submitted a patch to add a `-z` mode to `git worktree list --porcelain`. You can see it at [1].

Porcelain mode should indeed be quoting the path using quote_c_style(); the fact that it doesn't is a bug which would be nice to fix. This has been discussed previously[2], however, there may be backward compatibility concerns[3].

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.1164.git.1645801727732.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/ [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAPig+cQq_RnanDQ3jHfNz_L58WyzmsUJBhtdrLxa=H0v_io+WA@mail.gmail.com/ [3]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/936f9b7c-6d54-00bc-f136-4cb4c2836eb6@gmail.com/

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