1GITCLI(7)                         Git Manual                         GITCLI(7)
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NAME

6       gitcli - Git command-line interface and conventions
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SYNOPSIS

9       gitcli
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DESCRIPTION

12       This manual describes the convention used throughout Git CLI.
13
14       Many commands take revisions (most often "commits", but sometimes
15       "tree-ish", depending on the context and command) and paths as their
16       arguments. Here are the rules:
17
18       •   Options come first and then args. A subcommand may take dashed
19           options (which may take their own arguments, e.g. "--max-parents
20           2") and arguments. You SHOULD give dashed options first and then
21           arguments. Some commands may accept dashed options after you have
22           already gave non-option arguments (which may make the command
23           ambiguous), but you should not rely on it (because eventually we
24           may find a way to fix these ambiguity by enforcing the "options
25           then args" rule).
26
27       •   Revisions come first and then paths. E.g. in git diff v1.0 v2.0
28           arch/x86 include/asm-x86, v1.0 and v2.0 are revisions and arch/x86
29           and include/asm-x86 are paths.
30
31       •   When an argument can be misunderstood as either a revision or a
32           path, they can be disambiguated by placing -- between them. E.g.
33           git diff -- HEAD is, "I have a file called HEAD in my work tree.
34           Please show changes between the version I staged in the index and
35           what I have in the work tree for that file", not "show difference
36           between the HEAD commit and the work tree as a whole". You can say
37           git diff HEAD -- to ask for the latter.
38
39       •   Without disambiguating --, Git makes a reasonable guess, but errors
40           out and asking you to disambiguate when ambiguous. E.g. if you have
41           a file called HEAD in your work tree, git diff HEAD is ambiguous,
42           and you have to say either git diff HEAD -- or git diff -- HEAD to
43           disambiguate.
44
45       •   Because -- disambiguates revisions and paths in some commands, it
46           cannot be used for those commands to separate options and
47           revisions. You can use --end-of-options for this (it also works for
48           commands that do not distinguish between revisions in paths, in
49           which case it is simply an alias for --).
50
51           When writing a script that is expected to handle random user-input,
52           it is a good practice to make it explicit which arguments are which
53           by placing disambiguating -- at appropriate places.
54
55       •   Many commands allow wildcards in paths, but you need to protect
56           them from getting globbed by the shell. These two mean different
57           things:
58
59               $ git restore *.c
60               $ git restore \*.c
61
62           The former lets your shell expand the fileglob, and you are asking
63           the dot-C files in your working tree to be overwritten with the
64           version in the index. The latter passes the *.c to Git, and you are
65           asking the paths in the index that match the pattern to be checked
66           out to your working tree. After running git add hello.c; rm
67           hello.c, you will not see hello.c in your working tree with the
68           former, but with the latter you will.
69
70       •   Just as the filesystem .  (period) refers to the current directory,
71           using a .  as a repository name in Git (a dot-repository) is a
72           relative path and means your current repository.
73
74       Here are the rules regarding the "flags" that you should follow when
75       you are scripting Git:
76
77       •   It’s preferred to use the non-dashed form of Git commands, which
78           means that you should prefer git foo to git-foo.
79
80       •   Splitting short options to separate words (prefer git foo -a -b to
81           git foo -ab, the latter may not even work).
82
83       •   When a command-line option takes an argument, use the stuck form.
84           In other words, write git foo -oArg instead of git foo -o Arg for
85           short options, and git foo --long-opt=Arg instead of git foo
86           --long-opt Arg for long options. An option that takes optional
87           option-argument must be written in the stuck form.
88
89       •   When you give a revision parameter to a command, make sure the
90           parameter is not ambiguous with a name of a file in the work tree.
91           E.g. do not write git log -1 HEAD but write git log -1 HEAD --; the
92           former will not work if you happen to have a file called HEAD in
93           the work tree.
94
95       •   Many commands allow a long option --option to be abbreviated only
96           to their unique prefix (e.g. if there is no other option whose name
97           begins with opt, you may be able to spell --opt to invoke the
98           --option flag), but you should fully spell them out when writing
99           your scripts; later versions of Git may introduce a new option
100           whose name shares the same prefix, e.g.  --optimize, to make a
101           short prefix that used to be unique no longer unique.
102

ENHANCED OPTION PARSER

104       From the Git 1.5.4 series and further, many Git commands (not all of
105       them at the time of the writing though) come with an enhanced option
106       parser.
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108       Here is a list of the facilities provided by this option parser.
109
110   Magic Options
111       Commands which have the enhanced option parser activated all understand
112       a couple of magic command-line options:
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114       -h
115           gives a pretty printed usage of the command.
116
117               $ git describe -h
118               usage: git describe [<options>] <commit-ish>*
119                  or: git describe [<options>] --dirty
120
121                   --contains            find the tag that comes after the commit
122                   --debug               debug search strategy on stderr
123                   --all                 use any ref
124                   --tags                use any tag, even unannotated
125                   --long                always use long format
126                   --abbrev[=<n>]        use <n> digits to display SHA-1s
127
128           Note that some subcommand (e.g.  git grep) may behave differently
129           when there are things on the command line other than -h, but git
130           subcmd -h without anything else on the command line is meant to
131           consistently give the usage.
132
133       --help-all
134           Some Git commands take options that are only used for plumbing or
135           that are deprecated, and such options are hidden from the default
136           usage. This option gives the full list of options.
137
138   Negating options
139       Options with long option names can be negated by prefixing --no-. For
140       example, git branch has the option --track which is on by default. You
141       can use --no-track to override that behaviour. The same goes for
142       --color and --no-color.
143
144   Aggregating short options
145       Commands that support the enhanced option parser allow you to aggregate
146       short options. This means that you can for example use git rm -rf or
147       git clean -fdx.
148
149   Abbreviating long options
150       Commands that support the enhanced option parser accepts unique prefix
151       of a long option as if it is fully spelled out, but use this with a
152       caution. For example, git commit --amen behaves as if you typed git
153       commit --amend, but that is true only until a later version of Git
154       introduces another option that shares the same prefix, e.g. git commit
155       --amenity option.
156
157   Separating argument from the option
158       You can write the mandatory option parameter to an option as a separate
159       word on the command line. That means that all the following uses work:
160
161           $ git foo --long-opt=Arg
162           $ git foo --long-opt Arg
163           $ git foo -oArg
164           $ git foo -o Arg
165
166       However, this is NOT allowed for switches with an optional value, where
167       the stuck form must be used:
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169           $ git describe --abbrev HEAD     # correct
170           $ git describe --abbrev=10 HEAD  # correct
171           $ git describe --abbrev 10 HEAD  # NOT WHAT YOU MEANT
172

NOTES ON FREQUENTLY CONFUSED OPTIONS

174       Many commands that can work on files in the working tree and/or in the
175       index can take --cached and/or --index options. Sometimes people
176       incorrectly think that, because the index was originally called cache,
177       these two are synonyms. They are not — these two options mean very
178       different things.
179
180       •   The --cached option is used to ask a command that usually works on
181           files in the working tree to only work with the index. For example,
182           git grep, when used without a commit to specify from which commit
183           to look for strings in, usually works on files in the working tree,
184           but with the --cached option, it looks for strings in the index.
185
186       •   The --index option is used to ask a command that usually works on
187           files in the working tree to also affect the index. For example,
188           git stash apply usually merges changes recorded in a stash entry to
189           the working tree, but with the --index option, it also merges
190           changes to the index as well.
191
192       git apply command can be used with --cached and --index (but not at the
193       same time). Usually the command only affects the files in the working
194       tree, but with --index, it patches both the files and their index
195       entries, and with --cached, it modifies only the index entries.
196
197       See also
198       https://lore.kernel.org/git/7v64clg5u9.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net/
199       and
200       https://lore.kernel.org/git/7vy7ej9g38.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org/
201       for further information.
202
203       Some other commands that also work on files in the working tree and/or
204       in the index can take --staged and/or --worktree.
205
206--staged is exactly like --cached, which is used to ask a command
207           to only work on the index, not the working tree.
208
209--worktree is the opposite, to ask a command to work on the working
210           tree only, not the index.
211
212       •   The two options can be specified together to ask a command to work
213           on both the index and the working tree.
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GIT

216       Part of the git(1) suite
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220Git 2.39.1                        2023-01-13                         GITCLI(7)
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