From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
To: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Cc: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>,
Git Mailing list <git@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: is there a stylistic preference for a trailing "--" on a command?
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:39:54 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20171111151907.owrbpnn35aepj4ha@sigill.intra.peff.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAGZ79kavxFA_wBzcSbR8LT4uZGkdv4c07ZMfE4TK0tkooMGg6Q@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 10:12:39AM -0800, Stefan Beller wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 5:57 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> >
> > just noticed these examples in "man git-bisect":
> >
> > EXAMPLES
> > $ git bisect start HEAD v1.2 -- # HEAD is bad, v1.2 is good
> > ...
> > $ git bisect start HEAD origin -- # HEAD is bad, origin is good
> > ...
> > $ git bisect start HEAD HEAD~10 -- # culprit is among the last 10
> >
> > is there some rationale or stylistic significance to those trailing
> > "--" on those commands? i assume they have no effect, just curious as
> > to why they're there.
>
> By having the -- there, it is clear that the strings are ref specs and not files
> of such a name. (Who would want to store a file named HEAD~10 in their
> repo?)
Just to be explicit, that makes it not just clear to the user but clear
to Git. Without a "--" there heuristics that kick in. The first section
of the "gitcli" manpage talks about this, though I don't know that we
explicitly document the heuristics anywhere (and I think that is
intentional -- we promise only to try to do what you meant, and scripts
that want exact behavior should use a disambiguating "--").
-Peff
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-11-11 15:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-11-10 13:57 is there a stylistic preference for a trailing "--" on a command? Robert P. J. Day
2017-11-10 18:12 ` Stefan Beller
2017-11-11 15:39 ` Jeff King [this message]
2017-11-12 1:18 ` Junio C Hamano
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