Hi Miriam, On Wed, 23 Sep 2020, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > On Wed, 23 Sep 2020, Miriam R. wrote: > > > Applying some of your suggestions related to removing some 'eval' in > > git-bisect shell script, a bug has appeared. It seems it is related to > > a previous code merged before my internship. > > Now you got me curious: what bug did you see? I found your fork and ran the test, and this is the first symptom: -- snip -- [...] ++ git bisect skip Bisecting: 1 revision left to test after this (roughly 1 step) [32a594a3fdac2d57cf6d02987e30eec68511498c] Add <4: Ciao for now> into <hello>. ++ git bisect good ++ grep '3082e11d3a0f2edca194c8ce1eb802256e38e75e is the first bad commit' my_bisect_log.txt 3082e11d3a0f2edca194c8ce1eb802256e38e75e is the first bad commit ++ git bisect log ++ git bisect reset Previous HEAD position was 32a594a Add <4: Ciao for now> into <hello>. Switched to branch 'other' ok 22 - bisect skip: add line and then a new test expecting success of 6030.23 'bisect skip and bisect replay': git bisect replay log_to_replay.txt > my_bisect_log.txt && grep "$HASH5 is the first bad commit" my_bisect_log.txt && git bisect reset ++ git bisect replay log_to_replay.txt error: update_ref failed for ref 'refs/bisect/bad': cannot update ref 'refs/bisect/bad': trying to write ref 'refs/bisect/bad' with nonexistent object 10006d020000000068986d020000000054f65f00 error: last command exited with $?=1 not ok 23 - bisect skip and bisect replay # # git bisect replay log_to_replay.txt > my_bisect_log.txt && # grep "$HASH5 is the first bad commit" my_bisect_log.txt && # git bisect reset -- snap -- So I dug a little bit further (and applied Christian's patch in the meantime), and it turns out that the `eval` has nothing to do with what I originally thought it would be required for: I thought that it wanted to prevent `exit` calls from actually exiting the script. Instead, those `eval` calls are required because the arguments are provided in quoted form. For example, during the execution of t6030.68, the `eval` would expand the call eval "git bisect--helper --bisect-start $rev $tail" to git bisect--helper --bisect-start '--term-old' 'term2' '--term-new' 'term1' Therefore, the `eval` really needs to stay in place (also the other `eval` I had originally suggested to remove, for the same reason). I would still recommend appending `|| exit`, even if it just so happens that we will eventually abort when the `bisect--helper` command failed anyway, because the next command will then fail, and abort. But it's cleaner to abort already when this invocation failed rather than relying on that side effect. Ciao, Dscho