Re: Bug or unexpected behaviour in git show <rev>:a\b

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Subject: verify_filename(): handle backslashes in "wildcards are pathspecs" rule

Commit 28fcc0b71a (pathspec: avoid the need of "--" when wildcard is
used, 2015-05-02) allowed:

  git rev-parse '*.c'

without the double-dash. But the rule it uses to check for wildcards
actually looks for any glob special. This is overly liberal, as it means
that a pattern that doesn't actually do any wildcard matching, like
"a\b", will be considered a pathspec.

If you do have such a file on disk, that's presumably what you wanted.
But if you don't, the results are confusing: rather than say "there's no
such path a\b", we'll quietly accept it as a pathspec which very likely
matches nothing (or at least not what you intended). Likewise, looking
for path "a\*b" doesn't expand the search at all; it would only find a
single entry, "a*b".

This commit switches the rule to trigger only when glob metacharacters
would expand the search, meaning both of those cases will now report an
error (you can still disambiguate using "--", of course; we're just
tightening the DWIM heuristic).

Makes sense.  Thanks.