On Fri, 1 Jun 2018, Jeff King wrote: > On Fri, Jun 01, 2018 at 04:14:12PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: ... snip ... > > ok, so how on earth would i use "git config" at the command line > > to set a config variable with some arbitrary level of subsections? > > let's try this: > > You don't. There are only three levels: section, (optional) > subsection, and key. If there is a subsection, it consists of > _everything_ between the two outer periods. > > > $ git config --global a.b.c.d.e rday > > > > huh ... seemed to work fine, and added this to my ~/.gitconfig: > > > > [a "b.c.d"] > > e = rday > > > > as i see it, the first component is intgerpreted as the section name, > > the last component is the variable/key(?) name, and everything in > > between is treated as subsection(s), which is not at all obvious from > > that Doc file, or from "man git-config". > > Yep, your understanding is correct. > > > and if a section name can contain periods, how would you specify > > that at the command line? > > You can't, because section names cannot contain periods. ;) if (for some weird reason) i wanted to define a multi-level subsection, is there any benefit to using periods as i did above, as opposed to any other delimiting character? apparently, running this: $ git config --global a.b_c_d.e rday dumps this into my ~/.gitconfig: [a "b_c_d"] e = rday if i wanted to do something this admittedly awkward, would using periods give me some benefit related to, i don't know, regex matching, as compared to using a different character? or am i just way overthinking this? is anyone out there actually taking advantage of multi-level subsections? rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca/dokuwiki Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================