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Author SHA1 Message Date
Štěpán Němec cebfaaa333 doc/cat-file: make synopsis and description less confusing
The DESCRIPTION's "first form" is actually the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th
form in SYNOPSIS, the "second form" is the 4th one.

Interestingly, this state of affairs was introduced in
97fe725075 (cat-file docs: fix SYNOPSIS and "-h" output, 2021-12-28)
with the claim of "Now the two will match again." ("the two" being
DESCRIPTION and SYNOPSIS)...

The description also suffers from other correctness and clarity issues,
e.g., the "first form" paragraph discusses -p, -s and -t, but leaves out
-e, which is included in the corresponding SYNOPSIS section; the second
paragraph mentions <format>, which doesn't occur in SYNOPSIS at all, and
of the three batch options, really only describes the behavior of
--batch-check.  Also the mention of "drivers" seems an implementation
detail not adding much clarity in a short summary (and isn't expanded
upon in the rest of the man page, either).

Rather than trying to maintain one-to-one (or N-to-M) correspondence
between the DESCRIPTION and SYNOPSIS forms, creating duplication and
providing opportunities for error, shorten the former into a concise
summary describing the two general modes of operation: batch and
non-batch, leaving details to the subsequent manual sections.

While here, fix a grammar error in the description of -e and make the
following further minor improvements:

  NAME:
    shorten ("content or type and size" isn't the whole story; say
    "details" and leave the actual details to later sections)

  SYNOPSIS and --help:
    move the (--textconv | --filters) form before --batch, closer
    to the other non-batch forms

Signed-off-by: Štěpán Němec <stepnem@smrk.net>
Acked-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2023-10-09 12:46:33 -07:00
Patrick Steinhardt f79e18849b cat-file: add option '-Z' that delimits input and output with NUL
In db9d67f2e9 (builtin/cat-file.c: support NUL-delimited input with
`-z`, 2022-07-22), we have introduced a new mode to read the input via
NUL-delimited records instead of newline-delimited records. This allows
the user to query for revisions that have newlines in their path
component. While unusual, such queries are perfectly valid and thus it
is clear that we should be able to support them properly.

Unfortunately, the commit only changed the input to be NUL-delimited,
but didn't change the output at the same time. While this is fine for
queries that are processed successfully, it is less so for queries that
aren't. In the case of missing commits for example the result can become
entirely unparsable:

```
$ printf "7ce4f05bae8120d9fa258e854a8669f6ea9cb7b1 blob 10\n1234567890\n\n\commit000" |
    git cat-file --batch -z
7ce4f05bae blob 10
1234567890

commit missing
```

This is of course a crafted query that is intentionally gaming the
deficiency, but more benign queries that contain newlines would have
similar problems.

Ideally, we should have also changed the output to be NUL-delimited when
`-z` is specified to avoid this problem. As the input is NUL-delimited,
it is clear that the output in this case cannot ever contain NUL
characters by itself. Furthermore, Git does not allow NUL characters in
revisions anyway, further stressing the point that using NUL-delimited
output is safe. The only exception is of course the object data itself,
but as git-cat-file(1) prints the size of the object data clients should
read until that specified size has been consumed.

But even though `-z` has only been introduced a few releases ago in Git
v2.38.0, changing the output format retroactively to also NUL-delimit
output would be a backwards incompatible change. And while one could
make the argument that the output is inherently broken already, we need
to assume that there are existing users out there that use it just fine
given that revisions containing newlines are quite exotic.

Instead, introduce a new option `-Z` that switches to NUL-delimited
input and output. While this new option could arguably only switch the
output format to be NUL-delimited, the consequence would be that users
have to always specify both `-z` and `-Z` when the input may contain
newlines. On the other hand, if the user knows that there never will be
newlines in the input, they don't have to use either of those options.
There is thus no usecase that would warrant treating input and output
format separately, which is why we instead opt to "do the right thing"
and have `-Z` mean to NUL-terminate both formats.

The old `-z` option is marked as deprecated with a hint that its output
may become unparsable. It is thus hidden both from the synopsis as well
as the command's help output.

Co-authored-by: Toon Claes <toon@iotcl.com>
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2023-06-12 13:23:46 -07:00
Martin Ågren 8534bb4cb1 git-cat-file.txt: fix list continuations rendering literally
With Asciidoctor, all of the '+' introduced in a797c0ea04 ("cat-file:
add mailmap support to --batch-check option", 2022-12-20) render
literally rather than functioning as list continuations. With asciidoc,
this renders just fine. It's not too surprising that there is room for
ambiguity and surprises here, since we have lists within lists.

Simply replacing all of these '+' with empty lines makes this render
fine using both tools. Except, in the third hunk, where after this inner
'*' list ends, we want to continue with more contents of the outer list
item (`--batch-command=<format>`). We can solve any ambiguity here and
make this clear to both tools by wrapping the inner list in an open
block (using "--").

For consistency, let's wrap all three of these inner lists from
a797c0ea04 in open blocks. This also future-proofs us a little -- if we
ever gain more contents after any of those first two lists, as we did
already in a797c0ea04 for the third list, we're prepared and should
render fine with both asciidoc and Asciidoctor from the start.

Signed-off-by: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2023-01-18 08:24:39 -08:00
Siddharth Asthana a797c0ea04 cat-file: add mailmap support to --batch-check option
Even though the cat-file command with `--batch-check` option does not
complain when `--use-mailmap` option is given, the latter option is
ignored. Compute the size of the object after replacing the idents and
report it instead.

In order to make `--batch-check` option honour the mailmap mechanism we
have to read the contents of the commit/tag object.

There were two ways to do it:

1. Make two calls to `oid_object_info_extended()`. If `--use-mailmap`
   option is given, the first call will get us the type of the object
   and second call will only be made if the object type is either a
   commit or tag to get the contents of the object.

2. Make one call to `oid_object_info_extended()` to get the type of the
   object. Then, if the object type is either of commit or tag, make a
   call to `repo_read_object_file()` to read the contents of the object.

I benchmarked the following command with both the above approaches and
compared against the current implementation where `--use-mailmap`
option is ignored:

`git cat-file --use-mailmap --batch-all-objects --batch-check --buffer
--unordered`

The results can be summarized as follows:
                       Time (mean ± σ)
default               827.7 ms ± 104.8 ms
first approach        6.197 s ± 0.093 s
second approach       1.975 s ± 0.217 s

Since, the second approach is faster than the first one, I implemented
it in this patch.

The command git cat-file can now use the mailmap mechanism to replace
idents with canonical versions for commit and tag objects. There are
several options like `--batch`, `--batch-check` and `--batch-command`
that can be combined with `--use-mailmap`. But the documentation for
`--batch`, `--batch-check` and `--batch-command` doesn't say so. This
patch fixes that documentation.

Mentored-by: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Mentored-by: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Helped-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Siddharth Asthana <siddharthasthana31@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-12-20 15:20:45 +09:00
Siddharth Asthana 49050a043b cat-file: add mailmap support to -s option
Even though the cat-file command with `-s` option does not complain when
`--use-mailmap` option is given, the latter option is ignored. Compute
the size of the object after replacing the idents and report it instead.

In order to make `-s` option honour the mailmap mechanism we have to
read the contents of the commit/tag object. Make use of the call to
`oid_object_info_extended()` to get the contents of the object and store
in `buf`. `buf` is later freed in the function.

Mentored-by: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Mentored-by: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Helped-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Siddharth Asthana <siddharthasthana31@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-12-20 15:20:45 +09:00
Junio C Hamano 1e92768aa1 Merge branch 'tb/cat-file-z'
Operating modes like "--batch" of "git cat-file" command learned to
take NUL-terminated input, instead of one-item-per-line.

* tb/cat-file-z:
  builtin/cat-file.c: support NUL-delimited input with `-z`
  t1006: extract --batch-command inputs to variables
2022-08-05 15:52:14 -07:00
Taylor Blau db9d67f2e9 builtin/cat-file.c: support NUL-delimited input with -z
When callers are using `cat-file` via one of the stdin-driven `--batch`
modes, all input is newline-delimited. This presents a problem when
callers wish to ask about, e.g. tree-entries that have a newline
character present in their filename.

To support this niche scenario, introduce a new `-z` mode to the
`--batch`, `--batch-check`, and `--batch-command` suite of options that
instructs `cat-file` to treat its input as NUL-delimited, allowing the
individual commands themselves to have newlines present.

The refactoring here is slightly unfortunate, since we turn loops like:

    while (strbuf_getline(&buf, stdin) != EOF)

into:

    while (1) {
        int ret;
        if (opt->nul_terminated)
            ret = strbuf_getline_nul(&input, stdin);
        else
            ret = strbuf_getline(&input, stdin);

        if (ret == EOF)
            break;
    }

It's tempting to think that we could use `strbuf_getwholeline()` and
specify either `\n` or `\0` as the terminating character. But for input
on platforms that include a CR character preceeding the LF, this
wouldn't quite be the same, since `strbuf_getline(...)` will trim any
trailing CR, while `strbuf_getwholeline(&buf, stdin, '\n')` will not.

In the future, we could clean this up further by introducing a variant
of `strbuf_getwholeline()` that addresses the aforementioned gap, but
that approach felt too heavy-handed for this pair of uses.

Some tests are added in t1006 to ensure that `cat-file` produces the
same output in `--batch`, `--batch-check`, and `--batch-command` modes
with and without the new `-z` option.

Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-07-22 21:42:06 -07:00
Siddharth Asthana ec031da9f9 cat-file: add mailmap support
git-cat-file is used by tools like GitLab to get commit tag contents
that are then displayed to users. This content which has author,
committer or tagger information, could benefit from passing through the
mailmap mechanism before being sent or displayed.

This patch adds --[no-]use-mailmap command line option to the git
cat-file command. It also adds --[no-]mailmap option as an alias to
--[no-]use-mailmap.

This patch also introduces new test cases to test the mailmap mechanism in
git cat-file command.

Mentored-by: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Mentored-by: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood@dunelm.org.uk>
Helped-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Siddharth Asthana <siddharthasthana31@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-07-18 12:55:53 -07:00
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 473fa2df08 Documentation: add --batch-command to cat-file synopsis
440c705ea6 (cat-file: add --batch-command mode, 2022-02-18) added
the new option and operating mode without listing it to the synopsis
section.  Fix it.

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-04-07 13:31:54 -07:00
John Cai 440c705ea6 cat-file: add --batch-command mode
Add a new flag --batch-command that accepts commands and arguments
from stdin, similar to git-update-ref --stdin.

At GitLab, we use a pair of long running cat-file processes when
accessing object content. One for iterating over object metadata with
--batch-check, and the other to grab object contents with --batch.

However, if we had --batch-command, we wouldn't need to keep both
processes around, and instead just have one --batch-command process
where we can flip between getting object info, and getting object
contents. Since we have a pair of cat-file processes per repository,
this means we can get rid of roughly half of long lived git cat-file
processes. Given there are many repositories being accessed at any given
time, this can lead to huge savings.

git cat-file --batch-command

will enter an interactive command mode whereby the user can enter in
commands and their arguments that get queued in memory:

<command1> [arg1] [arg2] LF
<command2> [arg1] [arg2] LF

When --buffer mode is used, commands will be queued in memory until a
flush command is issued that execute them:

flush LF

The reason for a flush command is that when a consumer process (A)
talks to a git cat-file process (B) and interactively writes to and
reads from it in --buffer mode, (A) needs to be able to control when
the buffer is flushed to stdout.

Currently, from (A)'s perspective, the only way is to either

1. kill (B)'s process
2. send an invalid object to stdin.

1. is not ideal from a performance perspective as it will require
spawning a new cat-file process each time, and 2. is hacky and not a
good long term solution.

With this mechanism of queueing up commands and letting (A) issue a
flush command, process (A) can control when the buffer is flushed and
can guarantee it will receive all of the output when in --buffer mode.
--batch-command also will not allow (B) to flush to stdout until a flush
is received.

This patch adds the basic structure for adding command which can be
extended in the future to add more commands. It also adds the following
two commands (on top of the flush command):

contents <object> LF
info <object> LF

The contents command takes an <object> argument and prints out the object
contents.

The info command takes an <object> argument and prints out the object
metadata.

These can be used in the following way with --buffer:

info <object> LF
contents <object> LF
contents <object> LF
info <object> LF
flush LF
info <object> LF
flush LF

When used without --buffer:

info <object> LF
contents <object> LF
contents <object> LF
info <object> LF
info <object> LF

Helped-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: John Cai <johncai86@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-02-18 11:21:46 -08:00
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 83dc443439 cat-file: don't whitespace-pad "(...)" in SYNOPSIS and usage output
Fix up whitespace issues around "(... | ...)" in the SYNOPSIS and
usage. These were introduced in ab/cat-file series. See
e145efa605 (Merge branch 'ab/cat-file' into next, 2022-01-05). In
particular 57d6a1cf96, 5a40417876 and 97fe725075 in that series.

We'll now correctly emit this usage output:

    $ git cat-file -h
    usage: git cat-file <type> <object>
       or: git cat-file (-e | -p) <object>
       or: git cat-file (-t | -s) [--allow-unknown-type] <object>
    [...]

Before this the last line of that would be inconsistent with the
preceding "(-e | -p)":

   or: git cat-file ( -t | -s ) [--allow-unknown-type] <object>

Reported-by: Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-01-12 10:12:20 -08:00
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 97fe725075 cat-file docs: fix SYNOPSIS and "-h" output
There were various inaccuracies in the previous SYNOPSIS output,
e.g. "--path" is not something that can optionally go with any options
except --textconv or --filters, as the output implied.

The opening line of the DESCRIPTION section is also "In its first
form[...]", which refers to "git cat-file <type> <object>", but the
SYNOPSIS section wasn't showing that as the first form!

That part of the documentation made sense in
d83a42f34a (Documentation: minor grammatical fixes in
git-cat-file.txt, 2009-03-22) when it was introduced, but since then
various options that were added have made that intro make no sense in
the context it was in. Now the two will match again.

The usage output here is not properly aligned on "master" currently,
but will be with my in-flight 4631cfc20b (parse-options: properly
align continued usage output, 2021-09-21), so let's indent things
correctly in the C code in anticipation of that.

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2021-12-30 13:05:28 -08:00
Jeff King 5c5b29b459 cat-file: disable refs/replace with --batch-all-objects
When we're enumerating all objects in the object database, it doesn't
make sense to respect refs/replace. The point of this option is to
enumerate all of the objects in the database at a low level. By
definition we'd already show the replacement object's contents (under
its real oid), and showing those contents under another oid is almost
certainly working against what the user is trying to do.

Note that you could make the same argument for something like:

  git show-index <foo.idx |
  awk '{print $2}' |
  git cat-file --batch

but there we can't know in cat-file exactly what the user intended,
because we don't know the source of the input. They could be trying to
do low-level debugging, or they could be doing something more high-level
(e.g., imagine a porcelain built around cat-file for its object
accesses). So in those cases, we'll have to rely on the user specifying
"git --no-replace-objects" to tell us what to do.

One _could_ make an argument that "cat-file --batch" is sufficiently
low-level plumbing that it should not respect replace-objects at all
(and the caller should do any replacement if they want it).  But we have
been doing so for some time. The history is a little tangled:

  - looking back as far as v1.6.6, we would not respect replace refs for
    --batch-check, but would for --batch (because the former used
    sha1_object_info(), and the replace mechanism only affected actual
    object reads)

  - this discrepancy was made even weirder by 98e2092b50 (cat-file:
    teach --batch to stream blob objects, 2013-07-10), where we always
    output the header using the --batch-check code, and then printed the
    object separately. This could lead to "cat-file --batch" dying (when
    it notices the size or type changed for a non-blob object) or even
    producing bogus output (in streaming mode, we didn't notice that we
    wrote the wrong number of bytes).

  - that persisted until 1f7117ef7a (sha1_file: perform object
    replacement in sha1_object_info_extended(), 2013-12-11), which then
    respected replace refs for both forms.

So it has worked reliably this way for over 7 years, and we should make
sure it continues to do so. That could also be an argument that
--batch-all-objects should not change behavior (which this patch is
doing), but I really consider the current behavior to be an unintended
bug. It's a side effect of how the code is implemented (feeding the oids
back into oid_object_info() rather than looking at what we found while
reading the loose and packed object storage).

The implementation is straight-forward: we just disable the global
read_replace_refs flag when we're in --batch-all-objects mode. It would
perhaps be a little cleaner to change the flag we pass to
oid_object_info_extended(), but that's not enough. We also read objects
via read_object_file() and stream_blob_to_fd(). The former could switch
to its _extended() form, but the streaming code has no mechanism for
disabling replace refs. Setting the global flag works, and as a bonus,
it's impossible to have any "oops, we're sometimes replacing the object
and sometimes not" bugs in the output (like the ones caused by
98e2092b50 above).

The tests here cover the regular-input and --batch-all-objects cases,
for both --batch-check and --batch. There is a test in t6050 that covers
the regular-input case with --batch already, but this new one goes much
further in actually verifying the output (plus covering --batch-check
explicitly). This is perhaps a little overkill and the tests would be
simpler just covering --batch-check, but I wanted to make sure we're
checking that --batch output is consistent between the header and the
content. The global-flag technique used here makes that easy to get
right, but this is future-proofing us against regressions.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2021-10-08 15:45:14 -07:00
Jeff King c3660cfb03 cat-file: mention --unordered along with --batch-all-objects
The note on ordering for --batch-all-objects was written when that was
the only possible ordering. These days we have --unordered, too, so
let's point to it.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2021-10-08 15:45:14 -07:00
Denton Liu f451960708 git-cat-file.txt: remove references to "sha1"
As part of the hash-transition, git can operate on more than just SHA-1
repositories. Replace "sha1"-specific documentation with hash-agnostic
terminology.

Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2021-03-03 16:43:06 -08:00
Denton Liu 4f0ba2d533 git-cat-file.txt: monospace args, placeholders and filenames
In modern documentation, args, placeholders and filenames are
monospaced. Apply monospace formatting to these objects.

Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2021-03-03 16:43:03 -08:00
Christian Couder 0172f7834a cat-file: add missing [=<format>] to usage/synopsis
When displaying cat-file usage, the fact that a <format> can
be specified is only visible when lookling at the --batch and
--batch-check options which are shown like this:

    --batch[=<format>]    show info and content of objects fed from the standard input
    --batch-check[=<format>]
                          show info about objects fed from the standard input

It seems more coherent and improves discovery to also show it
on the usage line.

In the documentation the DESCRIPTION tells us that "The output
format can be overridden using the optional <format> argument",
but we can't see the <format> argument in the SYNOPSIS above
the description which is confusing.

Signed-off-by: Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
Acked-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-07-01 15:54:05 -07:00
Junio C Hamano cfd9167c15 Merge branch 'dt/cat-file-batch-ambiguous'
"git cat-file --batch" reported a dangling symbolic link by
mistake, when it wanted to report that a given name is ambiguous.

* dt/cat-file-batch-ambiguous:
  t1512: test ambiguous cat-file --batch and --batch-output
  Do not print 'dangling' for cat-file in case of ambiguity
2019-02-06 22:05:21 -08:00
David Turner d1dd94b308 Do not print 'dangling' for cat-file in case of ambiguity
The return values -1 and -2 from get_oid could mean two different
things, depending on whether they were from an enum returned by
get_tree_entry_follow_symlinks, or from a different code path.  This
caused 'dangling' to be printed from a git cat-file in the case of an
ambiguous (-2) result.

Unify the results of get_oid* and get_tree_entry_follow_symlinks to be
one common type, with unambiguous values.

Signed-off-by: David Turner <novalis@novalis.org>
Reported-by: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2019-01-18 15:22:02 -08:00
Phillip Wood 748aa1aa34 Use "whitespace" consistently
Most of the messages and documentation use 'whitespace' rather than
'white space' or 'white spaces' convert to latter two to the former for
consistency.

Signed-off-by: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood@dunelm.org.uk>
Reviewed-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2019-01-10 10:37:42 -08:00
Jeff King 0750bb5b51 cat-file: support "unordered" output for --batch-all-objects
If you're going to access the contents of every object in a
packfile, it's generally much more efficient to do so in
pack order, rather than in hash order. That increases the
locality of access within the packfile, which in turn is
friendlier to the delta base cache, since the packfile puts
related deltas next to each other. By contrast, hash order
is effectively random, since the sha1 has no discernible
relationship to the content.

This patch introduces an "--unordered" option to cat-file
which iterates over packs in pack-order under the hood. You
can see the results when dumping all of the file content:

  $ time ./git cat-file --batch-all-objects --buffer --batch | wc -c
  6883195596

  real	0m44.491s
  user	0m42.902s
  sys	0m5.230s

  $ time ./git cat-file --unordered \
                        --batch-all-objects --buffer --batch | wc -c
  6883195596

  real	0m6.075s
  user	0m4.774s
  sys	0m3.548s

Same output, different order, way faster. The same speed-up
applies even if you end up accessing the object content in a
different process, like:

  git cat-file --batch-all-objects --buffer --batch-check |
  grep blob |
  git cat-file --batch='%(objectname) %(rest)' |
  wc -c

Adding "--unordered" to the first command drops the runtime
in git.git from 24s to 3.5s.

  Side note: there are actually further speedups available
  for doing it all in-process now. Since we are outputting
  the object content during the actual pack iteration, we
  know where to find the object and could skip the extra
  lookup done by oid_object_info(). This patch stops short
  of that optimization since the underlying API isn't ready
  for us to make those sorts of direct requests.

So if --unordered is so much better, why not make it the
default? Two reasons:

  1. We've promised in the documentation that --batch-all-objects
     outputs in hash order. Since cat-file is plumbing,
     people may be relying on that default, and we can't
     change it.

  2. It's actually _slower_ for some cases. We have to
     compute the pack revindex to walk in pack order. And
     our de-duplication step uses an oidset, rather than a
     sort-and-dedup, which can end up being more expensive.
     If we're just accessing the type and size of each
     object, for example, like:

       git cat-file --batch-all-objects --buffer --batch-check

     my best-of-five warm cache timings go from 900ms to
     1100ms using --unordered. Though it's possible in a
     cold-cache or under memory pressure that we could do
     better, since we'd have better locality within the
     packfile.

And one final question: why is it "--unordered" and not
"--pack-order"? The answer is again two-fold:

  1. "pack order" isn't a well-defined thing across the
     whole set of objects. We're hitting loose objects, as
     well as objects in multiple packs, and the only
     ordering we're promising is _within_ a single pack. The
     rest is apparently random.

  2. The point here is optimization. So we don't want to
     promise any particular ordering, but only to say that
     we will choose an ordering which is likely to be
     efficient for accessing the object content. That leaves
     the door open for further changes in the future without
     having to add another compatibility option.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2018-08-13 13:48:31 -07:00
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 9bd2ce5432 cat-file doc: document that -e will return some output
The -e option added in 7950571ad7 ("A few more options for
git-cat-file", 2005-12-03) has always errored out with message on
stderr saying that the provided object is malformed, like this:

    $ git cat-file -e malformed; echo $?
    fatal: Not a valid object name malformed
    128

A reader of this documentation may be misled into thinking that

    if ! git cat-file -e "$object" [...]

as opposed to:

    if ! git cat-file -e "$object" 2>/dev/null [...]

is sufficient to implement a truly silent test that checks whether
some arbitrary $object string was both valid, and pointed to an
object that exists.

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2018-01-10 15:08:14 -08:00
Evan Zacks be94568bc7 doc: fix minor typos (extra/duplicated words)
Following are several fixes for duplicated words ("of of") and one
case where an extra article ("a") slipped in.

Signed-off-by: Evan Zacks <zackse@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2017-09-14 15:09:02 +09:00
Johannes Schindelin 321459439e cat-file: support --textconv/--filters in batch mode
With this patch, --batch can be combined with --textconv or --filters.
For this to work, the input needs to have the form

	<object name><single white space><path>

so that the filters can be chosen appropriately.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-09-11 14:48:15 -07:00
Johannes Schindelin 7bcf341453 cat-file --textconv/--filters: allow specifying the path separately
There are circumstances when it is relatively easy to figure out the
object name for a given path, but not the name of the containing tree.
For example, when looking at a diff generated by Git, the object names
are recorded, but not the revision. As a matter of fact, the revisions
from which the diff was generated may not even exist locally.

In such a case, the user would have to generate a fake revision just to
be able to use --textconv or --filters.

Let's simplify this dramatically, because we do not really need that
revision at all: all we care about is that we know the path. In the
scenario described above, we do know the path, and we just want to
specify it separately from the object name.

Example usage:

	git cat-file --textconv --path=main.c 0f1937fd

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-09-11 14:48:15 -07:00
Johannes Schindelin b9e62f6011 cat-file: introduce the --filters option
The --filters option applies the convert_to_working_tree() filter for
the path when showing the contents of a regular file blob object;
the contents are written out as-is for other types of objects.

This feature comes in handy when a 3rd-party tool wants to work with
the contents of files from past revisions as if they had been checked
out, but without detouring via temporary files.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-09-11 14:47:46 -07:00
Johannes Schindelin 16dcc2992b cat-file: fix a grammo in the man page
"... has be ..." -> "... has to be ..."

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-08-24 09:09:28 -07:00
Matthieu Moy bcf9626a71 doc: typeset long command-line options as literal
Similarly to the previous commit, use backquotes instead of
forward-quotes, for long options.

This was obtained with:

  perl -pi -e "s/'(--[a-z][a-z=<>-]*)'/\`\$1\`/g" *.txt

and manual tweak to remove false positive in ascii-art (o'--o'--o' to
describe rewritten history).

Signed-off-by: Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-06-28 08:36:45 -07:00
Matthieu Moy 23f8239bbe doc: typeset short command-line options as literal
It was common in our documentation to surround short option names with
forward quotes, which renders as italic in HTML. Instead, use backquotes
which renders as monospace. This is one more step toward conformance to
Documentation/CodingGuidelines.

This was obtained with:

  perl -pi -e "s/'(-[a-z])'/\`\$1\`/g" *.txt

Signed-off-by: Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-06-28 08:20:52 -07:00
Junio C Hamano 33e8fc8740 usage: do not insist that standard input must come from a file
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>
2015-10-16 15:27:52 -07:00
Jeff King 3115ee45c8 cat-file: sort and de-dup output of --batch-all-objects
The sorting we could probably live without, but printing
duplicates is just a hassle for the user, who must then
de-dup themselves (or risk a wrong answer if they are doing
something like counting objects with a particular property).

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2015-06-26 09:24:42 -07:00
Jeff King 6a951937ae cat-file: add --batch-all-objects option
It can sometimes be useful to examine all objects in the
repository. Normally this is done with "git rev-list --all
--objects", but:

  1. That shows only reachable objects. You may want to look
     at all available objects.

  2. It's slow. We actually open each object to walk the
     graph. If your operation is OK with seeing unreachable
     objects, it's an order of magnitude faster to just
     enumerate the loose directories and pack indices.

You can do this yourself using "ls" and "git show-index",
but it's non-obvious.  This patch adds an option to
"cat-file --batch-check" to operate on all available
objects (rather than reading names from stdin).

This is based on a proposal by Charles Bailey to provide a
separate "git list-all-objects" command. That is more
orthogonal, as it splits enumerating the objects from
getting information about them. However, in practice you
will either:

  a. Feed the list of objects directly into cat-file anyway,
     so you can find out information about them. Keeping it
     in a single process is more efficient.

  b. Ask the listing process to start telling you more
     information about the objects, in which case you will
     reinvent cat-file's batch-check formatter.

Adding a cat-file option is simple and efficient. And if you
really do want just the object names, you can always do:

  git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectname)' --batch-all-objects

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2015-06-22 14:55:52 -07:00
Jeff King fc4937c372 cat-file: add --buffer option
We use a direct write() to output the results of --batch and
--batch-check. This is good for processes feeding the input
and reading the output interactively, but it introduces
measurable overhead if you do not want this feature. For
example, on linux.git:

  $ git rev-list --objects --all | cut -d' ' -f1 >objects
  $ time git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectsize)' \
          <objects >/dev/null
  real    0m5.440s
  user    0m5.060s
  sys     0m0.384s

This patch adds an option to use regular stdio buffering:

  $ time git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectsize)' \
          --buffer <objects >/dev/null
  real    0m4.975s
  user    0m4.888s
  sys     0m0.092s

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2015-06-22 14:55:52 -07:00
Junio C Hamano 67f0b6f3b2 Merge branch 'dt/cat-file-follow-symlinks'
"git cat-file --batch(-check)" learned the "--follow-symlinks"
option that follows an in-tree symbolic link when asked about an
object via extended SHA-1 syntax, e.g. HEAD:RelNotes that points at
Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt.  With the new option, the command
behaves as if HEAD:Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt was given as
input instead.

* dt/cat-file-follow-symlinks:
  cat-file: add --follow-symlinks to --batch
  sha1_name: get_sha1_with_context learns to follow symlinks
  tree-walk: learn get_tree_entry_follow_symlinks
2015-06-01 12:45:16 -07:00
David Turner 122d53464b cat-file: add --follow-symlinks to --batch
This wires the in-repo-symlink following code through to the cat-file
builtin.  In the event of an out-of-repo link, cat-file will print
the link in a new format.

Signed-off-by: David Turner <dturner@twopensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2015-05-20 13:46:21 -07:00
Karthik Nayak 39e4ae3880 cat-file: teach cat-file a '--allow-unknown-type' option
'git cat-file' throws an error while trying to print the type or
size of a broken/corrupt object. This is because these objects are
usually of unknown types.

Teach git cat-file a '--allow-unknown-type' option where it prints
the type or size of a broken/corrupt object without throwing
an error.

Modify '-t' and '-s' options to call sha1_object_info_extended()
directly to support the '--allow-unknown-type' option.

Add documentation for 'cat-file --allow-unknown-type'.

Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Helped-by: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Signed-off-by: Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com>

cat-file: add documentation for '--allow-unknown-type' option.

Signed-off-by: Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2015-05-06 13:35:48 -07:00
Jeff King 65ea9c3c3d cat-file: provide %(deltabase) batch format
It can be useful for debugging or analysis to see which
objects are stored as delta bases on top of others. This
information is available by running `git verify-pack`, but
that is extremely expensive (and is harder than necessary to
parse).

Instead, let's make it available as a cat-file query format,
which makes it fast and simple to get the bases for a subset
of the objects.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-12-26 11:54:26 -08:00
Junio C Hamano 89dde7882f Merge branch 'rh/ishes-doc'
We liberally use "committish" and "commit-ish" (and "treeish" and
"tree-ish"); as these are non-words, let's unify these terms to
their dashed form.  More importantly, clarify the documentation on
object peeling using these terms.

* rh/ishes-doc:
  glossary: fix and clarify the definition of 'ref'
  revisions.txt: fix and clarify <rev>^{<type>}
  glossary: more precise definition of tree-ish (a.k.a. treeish)
  use 'commit-ish' instead of 'committish'
  use 'tree-ish' instead of 'treeish'
  glossary: define commit-ish (a.k.a. committish)
  glossary: mention 'treeish' as an alternative to 'tree-ish'
2013-09-17 11:42:51 -07:00
Richard Hansen bb8040f9f9 use 'tree-ish' instead of 'treeish'
Replace 'treeish' in documentation and comments with 'tree-ish' to
match gitglossary(7).

The only remaining instances of 'treeish' are:
  * variable, function, and macro names
  * "(also treeish)" in the definition of tree-ish in gitglossary(7)

Signed-off-by: Richard Hansen <rhansen@bbn.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-09-04 15:02:56 -07:00
Jeff King 97be04077f cat-file: only split on whitespace when %(rest) is used
Commit c334b87b (cat-file: split --batch input lines on whitespace,
2013-07-11) taught `cat-file --batch-check` to split input lines on
the first whitespace, and stash everything after the first token
into the %(rest) output format element.  It claimed:

   Object names cannot contain spaces, so any input with
   spaces would have resulted in a "missing" line.

But that is not correct.  Refs, object sha1s, and various peeling
suffixes cannot contain spaces, but some object names can. In
particular:

  1. Tree paths like "[<tree>]:path with whitespace"

  2. Reflog specifications like "@{2 days ago}"

  3. Commit searches like "rev^{/grep me}" or ":/grep me"

To remain backwards compatible, we cannot split on whitespace by
default, hence we will ship 1.8.4 with the commit reverted.

Resurrect its attempt but in a weaker form; only do the splitting
when "%(rest)" is used in the output format. Since that element did
not exist at all before c334b87, old scripts cannot be affected.

The existence of object names with spaces does mean that you
cannot reliably do:

  echo ":path with space and other data" |
  git cat-file --batch-check="%(objectname) %(rest)"

as it would split the path and feed only ":path" to get_sha1. But
that command is nonsensical. If you wanted to see "and other data"
in "%(rest)", git cannot possibly know where the filename ends and
the "rest" begins.

It might be more robust to have something like "-z" to separate the
input elements. But this patch is still a reasonable step before
having that.  It makes the easy cases easy; people who do not care
about %(rest) do not have to consider it, and the %(rest) code
handles the spaces and newlines of "rev-list --objects" correctly.

Hard cases remain hard but possible (if you might get whitespace in
your input, you do not get to use %(rest) and must split and join
the output yourself using more flexible tools). And most
importantly, it does not preclude us from having different splitting
rules later if a "-z" (or similar) option is added.  So we can make
the hard cases easier later, if we choose to.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-08-05 09:30:48 -07:00
Junio C Hamano 062aeee8aa Revert "cat-file: split --batch input lines on whitespace"
This reverts commit c334b87b30c1464a1ab563fe1fb8de5eaf0e5bac; the
update assumed that people only used the command to read from
"rev-list --objects" output, whose lines begin with a 40-hex object
name followed by a whitespace, but it turns out that scripts feed
random extended SHA-1 expressions (e.g. "HEAD:$pathname") in which
a whitespace has to be kept.
2013-08-02 09:29:30 -07:00
Jeff King c334b87b30 cat-file: split --batch input lines on whitespace
If we get an input line to --batch or --batch-check that
looks like "HEAD foo bar", we will currently feed the whole
thing to get_sha1(). This means that to use --batch-check
with `rev-list --objects`, one must pre-process the input,
like:

  git rev-list --objects HEAD |
  cut -d' ' -f1 |
  git cat-file --batch-check

Besides being more typing and slightly less efficient to
invoke `cut`, the result loses information: we no longer
know which path each object was found at.

This patch teaches cat-file to split input lines at the
first whitespace. Everything to the left of the whitespace
is considered an object name, and everything to the right is
made available as the %(reset) atom. So you can now do:

  git rev-list --objects HEAD |
  git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectsize) %(rest)'

to collect object sizes at particular paths.

Even if %(rest) is not used, we always do the whitespace
split (which means you can simply eliminate the `cut`
command from the first example above).

This whitespace split is backwards compatible for any
reasonable input. Object names cannot contain spaces, so any
input with spaces would have resulted in a "missing" line.
The only input hurt is if somebody really expected input of
the form "HEAD is a fine-looking ref!" to fail; it will now
parse HEAD, and make "is a fine-looking ref!" available as
%(rest).

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-07-12 09:18:42 -07:00
Jeff King a4ac106178 cat-file: add %(objectsize:disk) format atom
This atom is just like %(objectsize), except that it shows
the on-disk size of the object rather than the object's true
size. In other words, it makes the "disk_size" query of
sha1_object_info_extended available via the command-line.

This can be used for rough attribution of disk usage to
particular refs, though see the caveats in the
documentation.

This patch does not include any tests, as the exact numbers
returned are volatile and subject to zlib and packing
decisions. We cannot even reliably guarantee that the
on-disk size is smaller than the object content (though in
general this should be the case for non-trivial objects).

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-07-12 09:18:42 -07:00
Jeff King 93d2a607ba cat-file: add --batch-check=<format>
The `cat-file --batch-check` command can be used to quickly
get information about a large number of objects. However, it
provides a fixed set of information.

This patch adds an optional <format> option to --batch-check
to allow a caller to specify which items they are interested
in, and in which order to output them. This is not very
exciting for now, since we provide the same limited set that
you could already get. However, it opens the door to adding
new format items in the future without breaking backwards
compatibility (or forcing callers to pay the cost to
calculate uninteresting items).

Since the --batch option shares code with --batch-check, it
receives the same feature, though it is less likely to be of
interest there.

The format atom names are chosen to match their counterparts
in for-each-ref. Though we do not (yet) share any code with
for-each-ref's formatter, this keeps the interface as
consistent as possible, and may help later on if the
implementations are unified.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-07-12 09:18:12 -07:00
Thomas Ackermann d5fa1f1a69 The name of the hash function is "SHA-1", not "SHA1"
Use "SHA-1" instead of "SHA1" whenever we talk about the hash function.
When used as a programming symbol, we keep "SHA1".

Signed-off-by: Thomas Ackermann <th.acker@arcor.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-04-15 11:08:37 -07:00
Jeff King 48bb914ed6 doc: drop author/documentation sections from most pages
The point of these sections is generally to:

  1. Give credit where it is due.

  2. Give the reader an idea of where to ask questions or
     file bug reports.

But they don't do a good job of either case. For (1), they
are out of date and incomplete. A much more accurate answer
can be gotten through shortlog or blame.  For (2), the
correct contact point is generally git@vger, and even if you
wanted to cc the contact point, the out-of-date and
incomplete fields mean you're likely sending to somebody
useless.

So let's drop the fields entirely from all manpages except
git(1) itself. We already point people to the mailing list
for bug reports there, and we can update the Authors section
to give credit to the major contributors and point to
shortlog and blame for more information.

Each page has a "This is part of git" footer, so people can
follow that to the main git manpage.
2011-03-11 10:59:16 -05:00
Jonathan Nieder 9d83e3827f Documentation: gitrevisions is in section 7
Fix references to gitrevisions(1) in the manual pages and HTML
documentation.

In practice, this will not matter much unless someone tries to use a
hard copy of the git reference manual.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2010-10-13 19:10:55 -07:00
Michael J Gruber f028cdae66 Documentation: link to gitrevisions rather than git-rev-parse
Currently, whenever we need documentation for revisions and ranges, we
link to the git-rev-parse man page, i.e. a plumbing man page, which has
this along with the documentation of all rev-parse modes.

Link to the new gitrevisions man page instead in all cases except
- when the actual git-rev-parse command is referred to or
- in very technical context (git-send-pack).

Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2010-07-05 13:39:13 -07:00
Michael J Gruber 9f77fe0224 git-cat-file.txt: Document --textconv
Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2010-06-24 13:10:59 -07:00
Jeff King 0e5168fd18 fix cat-file usage message and documentation
cat-file with an object on the command line requires an
option to tell it what to output (type, size, pretty-print,
etc). However, the square brackets in the usage imply that
those options are not required. This patch switches them to
parentheses to indicate "required but grouped-OR" (curly
braces might also work, but this follows the convention used
already by "git stash").

While we're at it, let's change the <sha1> specifier in the
usage to <object>. That's what the documentation uses, and
it does actually use the regular object lookup.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2009-05-25 12:08:15 -07:00