Re: [PATCH] grep: provide a noop --recursive option

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:55 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This --recursive (-r) option does nothing, and is purely here to
> appease people who have "grep -r ..." burned into their muscle memory.
>
> Requested-by: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
> Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
> ---
>
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 4:10 PM Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org> wrote:
> >
> > I often use "grep -r $pattern" to recursively grep a source tree. If
> > that takes too long, I hit ^C and tag "git" in front of the command
> > line and re-run it. git then complains "error: unknown switch `r'"
> > because "git grep" is naturally recursive.
> >
> > Could we have "git grep -r" accept the argument for compatibility?
> > Other important grep switches like "-i" are compatible, adding -r
> > would improve usability.
>
> I don't have an opinion on this either way, it doesn't scratch my
> itch, but hey, why not. Here's a patch to implement it.
>
>  Documentation/git-grep.txt | 6 ++++++
>  builtin/grep.c             | 3 +++
>  t/t7810-grep.sh            | 8 ++++++++
>  3 files changed, 17 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-grep.txt b/Documentation/git-grep.txt
> index a3049af1a3..a1aea8be4e 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-grep.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-grep.txt
> @@ -290,6 +290,12 @@ providing this option will cause it to die.
>         Do not output matched lines; instead, exit with status 0 when
>         there is a match and with non-zero status when there isn't.
>
> +-r::
> +--recursive::
> +       This option does nothing. git-grep is always recursive. This
> +       noop option is provided for compatibility with the muscle
> +       memory of people used to grep(1).

git-grep is always file/tree recursive, but there is --recurse-submodules
which is off by default. Instead of providing a short alias to a noop,
we could use -r for submodules. (And if you happen to have no
submodules, this is a noop for you)