git rev-list --objects behaves strangely with certain wildcard pathspecs, which seem to interact badly with its tree-walk recursion. To see the weirdness, there should generally be a wildcard-star occurring somewhere early on in the pattern - wildcards as suffixes / wildcards filtering the name of the blob, seems to work better than wildcards as prefixes / wildcards filtering the name of trees. A simple example of a wildcard pathspec that doesn't work is `*/*` == Steps to reproduce == 1. Get a git repo with a few different files and folders that's not too overwhelming. You could make your own, I've cloned https://github.com/computationalmystic/toy-repository 2. Run `git rev-list HEAD --objects -- PATHSPEC` where PATHSPEC has an early wildcard in. It will not give you the expected results. Make sure you quote the PATHSPEC so that your shell doesn't do any wildcard expansion, otherwise you are not testing rev-list's wildcard expansion. Note that whenever this is working and you match something so that it is output, generally all of its parent-trees and child-trees/blobs are output too. I don't know if this is working as intended or not, it's not documented in git rev-list. For example, here is what I found on the toy-repository I cloned. == First the expected behaviour == These work since the first wildcard is towards the end and is doing suffix-matching or matching the last blob: Group01 -> matches all of tree Group01 Group01/ -> matches all of tree Group01 Group01/* -> matches all of tree Group01 Group01* -> matches all of tree Group01 Group0 -> doesn't match anything Group0* -> matches Group01, Group02, Group03, etc Group01/READ* -> matches Group01/README.md Group01/*ME.md -> matches Group01/README.md Group01/*.md -> matches all .md files in Group01 == Possibly expected behaviour == Group0*/ -> doesn't output anything. This is a bit weird since Group01/ does match some things, and Group0*/ looks like it should match all of those same things at least, but I think maybe the absence of wildcards altogether means that the pathspec is considered to also match children of the matched object, whereas if the pathspec contains a wildcard, it is stricter - you have to append "/*" to get the same effect. (I observed similar behaviour when testing git diff) == Unexpected behaviour == These don't work since there is a wildcard early on doing prefix matching or trying to filter trees rather than blobs. */* -> should match all the blobs, but only outputs root trees */*.md -> should match nearly all the blobs, but only outputs root trees *README.md -> should match all README.md blobs, but only outputs the root README.md blob and root trees. */README.md -> should match all README.md blobs, but only outputs root trees Group0*/* -> should match lots of blobs, but only outputs root trees. == Figuring out the specification == You can run `git diff 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904..HEAD --name-only -- PATHSPEC` to get a second opinion of what things should match or not match your patchspec. This command seems to behave much better with wildcard pathspecs than `git rev-list --objects`
