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authorDave Borowitz <dborowitz@google.com>2017-12-21 08:10:42 -0500
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2017-12-22 12:51:43 -0800
commit1feb061701463410647665c4848b6466bf7a97c6 (patch)
treee33014076cd2f9fe0cced9e120bf6a159231e9ff /Documentation
parent3013dff8662eae06457fe6e5348dfe2270810ab2 (diff)
downloadgit-1feb061701463410647665c4848b6466bf7a97c6.tar.gz
config.txt: document behavior of backslashes in subsectionsdb/doc-config-section-names-with-bs
Unrecognized escape sequences are invalid in values: $ git config -f - --list <<EOF [foo] bar = "\t\\\y\"\u" EOF fatal: bad config line 2 in standard input But in subsection names, the backslash is simply dropped if the following character does not produce a recognized escape sequence: $ git config -f - --list <<EOF [foo "\t\\\y\"\u"] bar = baz EOF foo.t\y"u.bar=baz Although it would be nice for subsection names and values to have consistent behavior, changing the behavior for subsection names is a nonstarter since it would cause existing, valid config files to suddenly be interpreted differently. Signed-off-by: Dave Borowitz <dborowitz@google.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config.txt12
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 9593bfabaa..a63b329ff4 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -41,11 +41,13 @@ in the section header, like in the example below:
--------
Subsection names are case sensitive and can contain any characters except
-newline (doublequote `"` and backslash can be included by escaping them
-as `\"` and `\\`, respectively). Section headers cannot span multiple
-lines. Variables may belong directly to a section or to a given subsection.
-You can have `[section]` if you have `[section "subsection"]`, but you
-don't need to.
+newline and the null byte. Doublequote `"` and backslash can be included
+by escaping them as `\"` and `\\`, respectively. Backslashes preceding
+other characters are dropped when reading; for example, `\t` is read as
+`t` and `\0` is read as `0` Section headers cannot span multiple lines.
+Variables may belong directly to a section or to a given subsection. You
+can have `[section]` if you have `[section "subsection"]`, but you don't
+need to.
There is also a deprecated `[section.subsection]` syntax. With this
syntax, the subsection name is converted to lower-case and is also