Trevor Saunders <tbsaunde@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > There have been cases where I wanted grep to always ignore certain > files, but to still get text diffs for those files. One case is people > insist on using ChangeLog files, and another is people who commit > generated files of one sort or another. The attributes are to say "the contents to be stored in this file is of this nature". Something inherent to the type of the contents, and that is why there is no way to countermand them from the command line. The "nature of the content" may be "result of comparing two versions of them textually will never make sense to humans", or "result of finding substrings in them will never make sense to humans", which are what "-diff" and hypothetical "-grep" mean, respectively. "It is inconvenient that I see hits in ChangeLog files when I look for string BUG" does not make ChangeLog inherently "result of finding substrings in it never makes sense to humans"-kind of file type. Maybe somebody who is playing a role of a coder right now may not look at existing ChangeLog entries, but when that same person plays the role of a release manager next day, running grep on older ChangeLog files may become necessary to find changes related to recent changes. For these "per-invocation" differences, attributes to declare permenent/inherent nature of the contents is much less suited than per-invocation inclusion/exclusion mechanism based on pathspecs, I would think. -- 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