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authorÆvar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>2019-07-01 23:20:57 +0200
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2019-07-01 14:33:14 -0700
commit25754125cef278c7e9492fbd6dc4a28319b01f18 (patch)
tree2c2c2967cc00ac8aeaac6472aaf7ff3c927860ec /Documentation/git-grep.txt
parentd316af059d67273f381048cdf538d2e0667b6485 (diff)
downloadgit-25754125cef278c7e9492fbd6dc4a28319b01f18.tar.gz
grep: make the behavior for NUL-byte in patterns sane
The behavior of "grep" when patterns contained a NUL-byte has always been haphazard, and has served the vagaries of the implementation more than anything else. A pattern containing a NUL-byte can only be provided via "-f <file>". Since pickaxe (log search) has no such flag the NUL-byte in patterns has only ever been supported by "grep" (and not "log --grep"). Since 9eceddeec6 ("Use kwset in grep", 2011-08-21) patterns containing "\0" were considered fixed. In 966be95549 ("grep: add tests to fix blind spots with \0 patterns", 2017-05-20) I added tests for this behavior. Change the behavior to do the obvious thing, i.e. don't silently discard a regex pattern and make it implicitly fixed just because they contain a NUL-byte. Instead die if the backend in question can't handle them, e.g. --basic-regexp is combined with such a pattern. This is desired because from a user's point of view it's the obvious thing to do. Whether we support BRE/ERE/Perl syntax is different from whether our implementation is limited by C-strings. These patterns are obscure enough that I think this behavior change is OK, especially since we never documented the old behavior. Doing this also makes it easier to replace the kwset backend with something else, since we'll no longer strictly need it for anything we can't easily use another fixed-string backend for. Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/git-grep.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-grep.txt17
1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/git-grep.txt b/Documentation/git-grep.txt
index 2d27969057..c89fb569e3 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-grep.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-grep.txt
@@ -271,6 +271,23 @@ providing this option will cause it to die.
-f <file>::
Read patterns from <file>, one per line.
++
+Passing the pattern via <file> allows for providing a search pattern
+containing a \0.
++
+Not all pattern types support patterns containing \0. Git will error
+out if a given pattern type can't support such a pattern. The
+`--perl-regexp` pattern type when compiled against the PCRE v2 backend
+has the widest support for these types of patterns.
++
+In versions of Git before 2.23.0 patterns containing \0 would be
+silently considered fixed. This was never documented, there were also
+odd and undocumented interactions between e.g. non-ASCII patterns
+containing \0 and `--ignore-case`.
++
+In future versions we may learn to support patterns containing \0 for
+more search backends, until then we'll die when the pattern type in
+question doesn't support them.
-e::
The next parameter is the pattern. This option has to be