From 459842e1c2777812130545dc52753c6f4d517e21 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Denton Liu Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2019 16:10:13 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] config/alias.txt: document alias accepting non-command first word One can see that an alias that begins with a non-command first word, such as `loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase`, is permitted. However, this isn't immediately obvious to users as alias instances typically begin with a command. Document the fact that an alias can begin with a non-command first word so that users will be able to discover that this is a feature. Signed-off-by: Denton Liu Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano --- Documentation/config/alias.txt | 10 ++++++++++ 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/config/alias.txt b/Documentation/config/alias.txt index 5425449a50..f1ca739d57 100644 --- a/Documentation/config/alias.txt +++ b/Documentation/config/alias.txt @@ -7,6 +7,16 @@ alias.*:: spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping is supported. A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them. + +Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a +command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the +invocation of `git`. In particular, this is useful when used with `-c` +to pass in one-time configurations or `-p` to force pagination. For example, +`loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase` can be defined such that +running `git loud-rebase` would be equivalent to +`git -c commit.verbose=true rebase`. Also, `ps = -p status` would be a +helpful alias since `git ps` would paginate the output of `git status` +where the original command does not. ++ If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining `alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD`, the invocation -- 2.40.0