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| author | Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> | 2015-10-16 11:27:42 -0700 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> | 2015-10-16 15:27:52 -0700 |
| commit | 33e8fc87407505c3a96792fc47189d57b97b34c3 (patch) | |
| tree | 19f879dcf9af22e72f1d0c61411d661bb77bf4d6 /Documentation/git-show-ref.txt | |
| parent | 3c3d3f629a6176b401ebec455c5dd59ed1b5f910 (diff) | |
| download | git-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-show-ref.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/git-show-ref.txt | 7 |
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/git-show-ref.txt b/Documentation/git-show-ref.txt index 2a6f89b235..3a32451984 100644 --- a/Documentation/git-show-ref.txt +++ b/Documentation/git-show-ref.txt @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ SYNOPSIS 'git show-ref' [-q|--quiet] [--verify] [--head] [-d|--dereference] [-s|--hash[=<n>]] [--abbrev[=<n>]] [--tags] [--heads] [--] [<pattern>...] -'git show-ref' --exclude-existing[=<pattern>] < ref-list +'git show-ref' --exclude-existing[=<pattern>] DESCRIPTION ----------- @@ -23,8 +23,9 @@ particular ref exists. By default, shows the tags, heads, and remote refs. -The --exclude-existing form is a filter that does the inverse, it shows the -refs from stdin that don't exist in the local repository. +The --exclude-existing form is a filter that does the inverse. It reads +refs from stdin, one ref per line, and shows those that don't exist in +the local repository. Use of this utility is encouraged in favor of directly accessing files under the `.git` directory. |