Re: Support of '^' as alias for 'HEAD^'

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 01:24:18AM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:

quoted

Think what "log ^^ origin" would mean.  Is it "log ^HEAD^ origin"?
Is it "log HEAD^^ origin"?  They mean totally different things.

Sorry for my ignorance here but what does ^ *before* HEAD even mean? I

It means "not" (before "HEAD" or any other commit specifier). See
"Specifying Ranges" in "git help revisions".

quoted

Compared to that, at least ~<n> does not have such ambiguity within
the context of Git (having to quote is an ambiguity within the
context of using Git with shells that support dirstacks in their
tilde expansion).

Don't know whats dirstacks support either but that I guess just means
that bash (the shell I have always used) doesn't do that.

Bash does support them, but you may not use them personally. Here are
some examples of how a more bare "~" can go wrong:

  $ set -x
  [this instructs the shell to show us what it is executing]

  $ git log ~
  + git log /home/peff
  [oops, the shell expanded our home directory and passed it to git]

  $ git log ~1
  + git log '~1'
  [this one works ok, but...]

  $ pushd /tmp
  $ pushd $HOME
  $ git log ~1
  + git log /tmp
  [oops, pushd users cannot use ~<n> without quoting]

-Peff