It was discovered that when using the --recurse-submodules flag with `git grep` and `git ls-files` and specifying a relative path when not at the root causes the child processes spawned to error out with an error like: fatal: ..: '..' is outside repository While true that ".." is outside the scope of the submodule repository, it probably doesn't make much sense to the user who gave that pathspec with respect to the superproject. Since the child processes that are spawned to handle the submodules have some context that they are executing underneath a superproject (via the 'super_prefix'), they should be able to prevent dying under this circumstance. This series fixes this bug in both git grep and git ls-files as well as correctly formatting the output from submodules to handle the relative paths with "..". One of the changes made to fix this was to add an additional flag for the parse_pathspec() function in order to treat all paths provided as being from the root of the repository. I hesitantly selected the name 'PATHSPEC_FROMROOT' but I'm not fond of it since its too similar to the pathspec magic define 'PATHSPEC_FROMTOP'. So I'm open for naming suggestions. Brandon Williams (5): grep: illustrate bug when recursing with relative pathspec pathspec: add PATHSPEC_FROMROOT flag grep: fix bug when recuring with relative pathspec ls-files: illustrate bug when recursing with relative pathspec ls-files: fix bug when recuring with relative pathspec builtin/grep.c | 8 ++++-- builtin/ls-files.c | 8 ++++-- pathspec.c | 2 +- pathspec.h | 2 ++ t/t3007-ls-files-recurse-submodules.sh | 50 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ t/t7814-grep-recurse-submodules.sh | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 6 files changed, 107 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) -- 2.11.0.483.g087da7b7c-goog