On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 9:04 AM Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget
[off-list ref] wrote:

The use of 'grep' inside test_subcommand uses general patterns, leading
to sometimes needing escape characters to avoid incorrect matches.
Further, some platforms interpret different glob characters differently.

These are regular expression metacharacters, not glob characters. A
more general way to say this might be:

    Furthermore, it can be difficult to know which characters need
    escaping since the actual regular expression language implemented
    by various `grep`s differs between platforms; for instance, some
    may employ pure BRE, whereas others a mix of BRE & ERE.

    Sidestep this difficulty by using `grep -F`...

Use 'grep -F' to use an exact match. This requires removing escape
characters from existing callers. Luckily, this is only one test that
expects refspecs as part of the subcommand.

Reported-by: Eric Sunshine <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <redacted>

The Reported-by: feels a bit unusual in this context. Perhaps
Helped-by: would be more appropriate.

To be really robust and avoid accidental glob expansion (as unlikely
as it is), you should quote any arguments which contain glob
metacharacters such as "*" rather than supplying them bare like this.