On Tue, Jan 02, 2024 at 07:18:48AM -0800, Karthik Nayak wrote:

quoted

As "git for-each-ref" takes pattern that is prefix match, e.g.,

    $ git for-each-ref refs/remotes/

shows everything like refs/remotes/origin/main that begins with
refs/remotes/, I wonder if

    $ git for-each-ref ""

should mean what you are asking for.  After all, "git for-each-ref"
does *not* take "--branches" and others like "git log" family to
limit its operation to subhierarchy of "refs/" to begin with.

But I don't think using an empty pattern is the best way to go forward.
This would break the pattern matching feature. For instance, what if the
user wanted to print all refs, but pattern match "*_HEAD"?

Would that be

      $ git for-each-ref "" "*_HEAD"

I think this would be confusing, since the first pattern is now acting
as an option, since its not really filtering rather its changing the
search space.

Maybe "--all-refs" or "--all-ref-types" instead?

I tend to agree that the special empty pattern would be a good shorthand
for listing all references underneath refs/, including any top-level
psuedo-refs.

But I don't think that I quite follow what Karthik is saying here.
for-each-ref returns the union of references that match the given
pattern(s), not their intersection. So if you wanted to list just the
psudo-refs ending in '_HEAD', you'd do:

  $ git for-each-ref "*_HEAD"

I think if you wanted to list all pseudo-refs, calling the option
`--pseudo-refs` seems reasonable. But if you want to list some subset of
psueod-refs matching a given pattern, you should specify that pattern
directly.

Thanks,
Taylor