Hi Dave, Dave Bradley wrote: > G:\ws_test_env\GIT_TESTBED_TMP\fest-swing-1.x>git log --all --pretty=format:"%an %ad" -- pom.xml > xxxx xxxx Mon Nov 23 03:09:17 2009 +0000 > xxxx xxxx Mon Nov 23 02:42:24 2009 +0000 > > G:\ws_test_env\GIT_TESTBED_TMP\fest-swing-1.x>git log --all "--pretty=format:"%an %ad"" -- pom.xml > fatal: bad revision '%ad' On Linux, this example gets passed to git as six arguments: log --all --pretty=format:%an %ad -- pom.xml I think the intent was instead to pass five arguments (the third being '--pretty=format:%an %ad'). That means you shouldn't unquote before the space, or in other words that the space should be part of a quoted argument. On Windows, I believe the argument passing convention is more complicated. Programs can inspect the entire command line if they want to. But there's still an ambiguity in the command you passed: if I look at space-separated or double-quoted parts of the command line, it looks like git log --all "--pretty=format:" (no space) %an %ad (no space) "" -- pom.xml What's the right way to parse this? How can git tell whether %an %ad were meant to be separate arguments or not? In absence of a stronger convention I suspect the simplest rule is to mimic what a Unix shell does, where they are separate arguments because the space is not quoted. Cc-ing Windows folks in case they have more insight. Thanks and hope that helps, Jonathan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html