CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitcommand-line-interface
Jonathan Holvey
Jonathan Holvey

Reputation: 707

Is there a reason that shorthand options can't be stacked for Git's stash command?

There is a pattern in the Unix CLI world where frequently-used options are given a single-letter shorthand, and these can usually be combined together, or stacked. A very common example of this can be found with the rm command, which can remove directories recursively. These three commands are equivalent:

rm --recursive --force .
rm -r -f .
rm -rf .

Git has many sub-commands, each with many options. I've become used to Git allowing its shorthand options to be stacked for ease of use, like many other well-written CLI tools. For example:

git commit -am 'Create new commit message'

I've found that git stash is at least one exception, where the shorthands for the useful options --keep-index and --include-untracked cannot be stacked into -ku:

git stash -k -u  # This works
git stash -ku    # This doesn't

Is there a specific reason for this, other than that it hasn't been implemented? Are there other examples where Git options can't be stacked, and do these examples have specific reasons?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 48

Answers (1)

torek
torek

Reputation: 489708

In all but very recent versions of Git, git stash has been a shell script that (for whatever reason) didn't use Git's option parser. Starting in Git 2.22, there was a project to rewrite it in C. The C rewrite has a proper option parser. The rewrite, however, wasn't quite done until recently, and the old shell script version was still around.

As you reported in a comment, git stash -ku does work in Git 2.27, but not in Git 2.25. Git 2.27 is the first version in which the old shell script version is truly gone; probably this is when the option parsing was finally switched over as well.

Upvotes: 3

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