CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgit-stash
user42768
user42768

Reputation: 1971

git stash - prevent a misspelled subcommand from executing

In the git stash documentation, there is this paragraph:

For quickly making a snapshot, you can omit "push". In this mode, non-option arguments are not allowed to prevent a misspelled subcommand from making an unwanted stash entry. The two exceptions to this are stash -p which acts as alias for stash push -p and pathspecs, which are allowed after a double hyphen -- for disambiguation.

What exactly does the highlighted sentence mean? The only non-option arguments that I think can be used are <message> and <pathspec>....

Does it mean that if one writes the command git stash -m"message", git may think that the user misspelled the word stash, but it executes the command (git stash push) anyway?

Thank you.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 124

Answers (1)

Romain Valeri
Romain Valeri

Reputation: 21918

To my understanding, it's linked to the typical behaviour of git stash save.

If you do

git stash save whatever you want

then every argument ('whatever', 'you', and 'want') will be taken as a whole to compose the stash message. (note : stash save is deprecated)

Now, as git stash push allows omitting push, the statement you quote in bold is making "clear" (obviously, not enough) that the behaviour we just saw about git stash save does NOT apply. Other non-option arguments are not allowed here.

In short, an example of what we cannot do :

git stash whatever I want

where push would be implied after stash.

Or more specifically (to address the "misspelling" part) :

# next command will create a new branch with the last stashed content
git stash branch myNewBranch

# and the next WOULD HAVE created a new stash entry with message "brnach myNewBranch"
# if not for the part you quoted in bold
git stash brnach myNewBranch

Edit after comments : But then this last misspelled line will just be rejected in error instead of stashing anything inadvertantly.

Upvotes: 2

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