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authorJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2015-10-16 11:27:42 -0700
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2015-10-16 15:27:52 -0700
commit33e8fc87407505c3a96792fc47189d57b97b34c3 (patch)
tree19f879dcf9af22e72f1d0c61411d661bb77bf4d6 /Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt
parent3c3d3f629a6176b401ebec455c5dd59ed1b5f910 (diff)
downloadgit-33e8fc87407505c3a96792fc47189d57b97b34c3.tar.gz
usage: do not insist that standard input must come from a filejc/usage-stdin
The synopsys text and the usage string of subcommands that read list of things from the standard input are often shown like this: git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes> This is problematic in a number of ways: * The way to use these commands is more often to feed them the output from another command, not feed them from a file. * Manual pages outside Git, commands that operate on the data read from the standard input, e.g "sort", "grep", "sed", etc., are not described with such a "< redirection-from-file" in their synopsys text. Our doing so introduces inconsistency. * We do not insist on where the output should go, by saying git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes> > <output> * As it is our convention to enclose placeholders inside <braket>, the redirection operator followed by a placeholder filename becomes very hard to read, both in the documentation and in the help text. Let's clean them all up, after making sure that the documentation clearly describes the modes that take information from the standard input and what kind of things are expected on the input. [jc: stole example for fmt-merge-msg from Jonathan] Helped-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt12
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt b/Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt
index 1e2a20dd26..ac44d85b0b 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt
@@ -9,17 +9,19 @@ git-get-tar-commit-id - Extract commit ID from an archive created using git-arch
SYNOPSIS
--------
[verse]
-'git get-tar-commit-id' < <tarfile>
+'git get-tar-commit-id'
DESCRIPTION
-----------
-Acts as a filter, extracting the commit ID stored in archives created by
-'git archive'. It reads only the first 1024 bytes of input, thus its
-runtime is not influenced by the size of <tarfile> very much.
+
+Read a tar archive created by 'git archive' from the standard input
+and extract the commit ID stored in it. It reads only the first
+1024 bytes of input, thus its runtime is not influenced by the size
+of the tar archive very much.
If no commit ID is found, 'git get-tar-commit-id' quietly exists with a
-return code of 1. This can happen if <tarfile> had not been created
+return code of 1. This can happen if the archive had not been created
using 'git archive' or if the first parameter of 'git archive' had been
a tree ID instead of a commit ID or tag.