Documentation: add shell guidelines

Add the following guideline to Documentation/CodingGuidelines:

	Break overlong lines after "&&", "||", and "|", not before
	them; that way the command can continue to subsequent lines
	without backslash at the end.

And the following to t/README (since it is specific to writing tests):

	Pipes and $(git ...) should be avoided when they swallow exit
	codes of Git processes

Signed-off-by: Matthew DeVore <matvore@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Matthew DeVore 2018-10-05 14:54:02 -07:00 committed by Junio C Hamano
parent 441ee35d83
commit a378fee5b0
2 changed files with 45 additions and 0 deletions

View file

@ -118,6 +118,24 @@ For shell scripts specifically (not exhaustive):
do this
fi
- If a command sequence joined with && or || or | spans multiple
lines, put each command on a separate line and put && and || and |
operators at the end of each line, rather than the start. This
means you don't need to use \ to join lines, since the above
operators imply the sequence isn't finished.
(incorrect)
grep blob verify_pack_result \
| awk -f print_1.awk \
| sort >actual &&
...
(correct)
grep blob verify_pack_result |
awk -f print_1.awk |
sort >actual &&
...
- We prefer "test" over "[ ... ]".
- We do not write the noiseword "function" in front of shell

View file

@ -474,6 +474,33 @@ And here are the "don'ts:"
platform commands; just use '! cmd'. We are not in the business
of verifying that the world given to us sanely works.
- Don't feed the output of a git command to a pipe, as in:
git -C repo ls-files |
xargs -n 1 basename |
grep foo
which will discard git's exit code and may mask a crash. In the
above example, all exit codes are ignored except grep's.
Instead, write the output of that command to a temporary
file with ">" or assign it to a variable with "x=$(git ...)" rather
than pipe it.
- Don't use command substitution in a way that discards git's exit
code. When assigning to a variable, the exit code is not discarded,
e.g.:
x=$(git cat-file -p $sha) &&
...
is OK because a crash in "git cat-file" will cause the "&&" chain
to fail, but:
test "refs/heads/foo" = "$(git symbolic-ref HEAD)"
is not OK and a crash in git could go undetected.
- Don't use perl without spelling it as "$PERL_PATH". This is to help
our friends on Windows where the platform Perl often adds CR before
the end of line, and they bundle Git with a version of Perl that