Most git commands respond to -h anywhere in the command line, or at
least as a first and lone argument, by printing the usage
information. For aliases, we can provide a little more information that
might be useful in interpreting/understanding the following output by
prepending a line telling that the command is an alias, and for what.
When one invokes a simple alias, such as "cp = cherry-pick"
with -h, this results in
$ git cp -h
'cp' is aliased to 'cherry-pick'
usage: git cherry-pick [<options>] <commit-ish>...
...
When the alias consists of more than one word, this provides the
additional benefit of informing the user which options are implicit in
using the alias, e.g. with "cp = cherry-pick -n":
$ git cp -h
'cp' is aliased to 'cherry-pick -n'
usage: git cherry-pick [<options>] <commit-ish>...
...
For shell commands, we cannot know how it responds to -h, but printing
this line to stderr should not hurt, and can help in figuring out what
is happening in a case like
$ git sc -h
'sc' is aliased to '!somecommand'
somecommand: invalid option '-h'
Suggested-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <rv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
git.c | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
diff --git a/git.c b/git.c
index a6f4b44af5..0211c2d4c0 100644
--- a/git.c
+++ b/git.c
@@ -318,6 +318,9 @@ static int handle_alias(int *argcp, const char ***argv)
alias_command = (*argv)[0];
alias_string = alias_lookup(alias_command);
if (alias_string) {
+ if (*argcp > 1 && !strcmp((*argv)[1], "-h"))
+ fprintf_ln(stderr, _("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"),
+ alias_command, alias_string);
if (alias_string[0] == '!') {
struct child_process child = CHILD_PROCESS_INIT;
int nongit_ok;
--
2.19.0
