On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 10:12:39AM -0800, Stefan Beller wrote: > On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 5:57 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > just noticed these examples in "man git-bisect": > > > > EXAMPLES > > $ git bisect start HEAD v1.2 -- # HEAD is bad, v1.2 is good > > ... > > $ git bisect start HEAD origin -- # HEAD is bad, origin is good > > ... > > $ git bisect start HEAD HEAD~10 -- # culprit is among the last 10 > > > > is there some rationale or stylistic significance to those trailing > > "--" on those commands? i assume they have no effect, just curious as > > to why they're there. > > By having the -- there, it is clear that the strings are ref specs and not files > of such a name. (Who would want to store a file named HEAD~10 in their > repo?) Just to be explicit, that makes it not just clear to the user but clear to Git. Without a "--" there heuristics that kick in. The first section of the "gitcli" manpage talks about this, though I don't know that we explicitly document the heuristics anywhere (and I think that is intentional -- we promise only to try to do what you meant, and scripts that want exact behavior should use a disambiguating "--"). -Peff
