git-clean fails to remove a file whose name contains \\, ", or \n, TAB, etc.

Not that it matters (or maybe this is a feature :-), because people who create such files in their working directory deserve what they get, Eh? :-)

But if leaving it, then perhaps git-clean should at least warn that it's not doing its job (i.e. remove the uses of rm's "-f").

To reproduce, run these commands:

nl=' ' git-init > /dev/null && touch "x\\n\"$nl" && git-clean && ls -b

Here's the output I get:

    Removing "x\\n\"\n"
    .git/  x\\n"\n

git-clean.sh needs to strip off leading and trailing double quotes (easy) as well as convert escapees back to originals (not easy as you might think, in sh) before running rm. Good excuse to rewrite it in perl.

Jim> Not that it matters (or maybe this is a feature :-), because people Jim> who create such files in their working directory deserve what they Jim> get, Eh? :-)

The problem is the newline in the string, since

  git-ls-files --others --directory $excl ${excl_info:+"$excl_info"} -- "$@" |
  while read -r file; do

is using newline as a delimiter.  Any file with a newline would mess this up.

Not being a shell programming expert, is there a way we could use -z and xargs -0 here instead?

merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:

Funny that we had this discussed on this list a few days ago ;-).

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 13:51:01 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

Unfortunately read does not have zero-delimited mode (at all). Unfortunately the backquote expansion does not preserve whitespace correctly, so it's not possible to use something like head.

Unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to feed newline to read (without -r flag), because the rules say that '\<NL>' => '' and '\<something>' => '<something>'.

Than I can't think of anything other than xargs -0. Unfortunately that is an external command, which only handles simple commands. So the question becomes how to give it a simple command. Well, there would be two ways:

 - A simple command might be:
	sh -c 'arbitrarily complex command' dummy arguments...
   (the "dummy" will become $0),
   so you can simply put the whole loop in single quotes, use for file; do
   instead of while read -r file; do and be done.

 - Reinvoke the program with special argument meaning it should run the inner
   loop. Ie. add an option --inner-loop option, that would run the
   inner loop and terminate and use xargs -0 "$0" --inner-loop

Both solutions require exporting all the necessary variables.

Jan> Than I can't think of anything other than xargs -0.

git-ls-files -z .... |
perl -0lne '
   $_ is each name here
'

On 2007-05-08 16:18:40 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

Have you seen this?

  http://xkcd.com/c224.html

Karl> Have you seen this?

Karl>   http://xkcd.com/c224.html

Yes.  You would be, oh, the 92nd person to point that out to me. :)

On 2007-05-08 16:29:07 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

Ah well. At least I sent it to the list too, so everyone can have their choice of snickering at the comic, or me, whichever seems silliest. :-)