git/Documentation/git-stripspace.txt
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

95 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext

git-stripspace(1)
=================
NAME
----
git-stripspace - Remove unnecessary whitespace
SYNOPSIS
--------
[verse]
'git stripspace' [-s | --strip-comments]
'git stripspace' [-c | --comment-lines]
DESCRIPTION
-----------
Read text, such as commit messages, notes, tags and branch
descriptions, from the standard input and clean it in the manner
used by Git.
With no arguments, this will:
- remove trailing whitespace from all lines
- collapse multiple consecutive empty lines into one empty line
- remove empty lines from the beginning and end of the input
- add a missing '\n' to the last line if necessary.
In the case where the input consists entirely of whitespace characters, no
output will be produced.
*NOTE*: This is intended for cleaning metadata, prefer the `--whitespace=fix`
mode of linkgit:git-apply[1] for correcting whitespace of patches or files in
the repository.
OPTIONS
-------
-s::
--strip-comments::
Skip and remove all lines starting with comment character (default '#').
-c::
--comment-lines::
Prepend comment character and blank to each line. Lines will automatically
be terminated with a newline. On empty lines, only the comment character
will be prepended.
EXAMPLES
--------
Given the following noisy input with '$' indicating the end of a line:
---------
|A brief introduction $
| $
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line $
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out. $
| $
|The end.$
| $
---------
Use 'git stripspace' with no arguments to obtain:
---------
|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out.$
|$
|The end.$
---------
Use 'git stripspace --strip-comments' to obtain:
---------
|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|The end.$
---------
GIT
---
Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite