add global --literal-pathspecs option

Git takes pathspec arguments in many places to limit the
scope of an operation. These pathspecs are treated not as
literal paths, but as glob patterns that can be fed to
fnmatch. When a user is giving a specific pattern, this is a
nice feature.

However, when programatically providing pathspecs, it can be
a nuisance. For example, to find the latest revision which
modified "$foo", one can use "git rev-list -- $foo". But if
"$foo" contains glob characters (e.g., "f*"), it will
erroneously match more entries than desired. The caller
needs to quote the characters in $foo, and even then, the
results may not be exactly the same as with a literal
pathspec. For instance, the depth checks in
match_pathspec_depth do not kick in if we match via fnmatch.

This patch introduces a global command-line option (i.e.,
one for "git" itself, not for specific commands) to turn
this behavior off. It also has a matching environment
variable, which can make it easier if you are a script or
porcelain interface that is going to issue many such
commands.

This option cannot turn off globbing for particular
pathspecs. That could eventually be done with a ":(noglob)"
magic pathspec prefix. However, that level of granularity is
more cumbersome to use for many cases, and doing ":(noglob)"
right would mean converting the whole codebase to use
"struct pathspec", as the usual "const char **pathspec"
cannot represent extra per-item flags.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/git.txt b/Documentation/git.txt
index 1d797f27e..8d869db68 100644
--- a/Documentation/git.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git.txt
@@ -422,6 +422,11 @@ help ...`.
 	Do not use replacement refs to replace git objects. See
 	linkgit:git-replace[1] for more information.
 
+--literal-pathspecs::
+	Treat pathspecs literally, rather than as glob patterns. This is
+	equivalent to setting the `GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS` environment
+	variable to `1`.
+
 
 GIT COMMANDS
 ------------
@@ -790,6 +795,16 @@ for further details.
 	as a file path and will try to write the trace messages
 	into it.
 
+GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS::
+	Setting this variable to `1` will cause git to treat all
+	pathspecs literally, rather than as glob patterns. For example,
+	running `GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS=1 git log -- '*.c'` will search
+	for commits that touch the path `*.c`, not any paths that the
+	glob `*.c` matches. You might want this if you are feeding
+	literal paths to git (e.g., paths previously given to you by
+	`git ls-tree`, `--raw` diff output, etc).
+
+
 Discussion[[Discussion]]
 ------------------------