usage: do not insist that standard input must come from a file
commit33e8fc87407505c3a96792fc47189d57b97b34c3
authorJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Fri, 16 Oct 2015 18:27:42 +0000 (16 11:27 -0700)
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:27:52 +0000 (16 15:27 -0700)
tree19f879dcf9af22e72f1d0c61411d661bb77bf4d6
parent3c3d3f629a6176b401ebec455c5dd59ed1b5f910
usage: do not insist that standard input must come from a file

The synopsys text and the usage string of subcommands that read list
of things from the standard input are often shown like this:

git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes>

This is problematic in a number of ways:

 * The way to use these commands is more often to feed them the
   output from another command, not feed them from a file.

 * Manual pages outside Git, commands that operate on the data read
   from the standard input, e.g "sort", "grep", "sed", etc., are not
   described with such a "< redirection-from-file" in their synopsys
   text.  Our doing so introduces inconsistency.

 * We do not insist on where the output should go, by saying

git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes> > <output>

 * As it is our convention to enclose placeholders inside <braket>,
   the redirection operator followed by a placeholder filename
   becomes very hard to read, both in the documentation and in the
   help text.

Let's clean them all up, after making sure that the documentation
clearly describes the modes that take information from the standard
input and what kind of things are expected on the input.

[jc: stole example for fmt-merge-msg from Jonathan]

Helped-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
25 files changed:
Documentation/git-cat-file.txt
Documentation/git-check-attr.txt
Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
Documentation/git-commit-tree.txt
Documentation/git-fmt-merge-msg.txt
Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt
Documentation/git-hash-object.txt
Documentation/git-mktag.txt
Documentation/git-patch-id.txt
Documentation/git-show-index.txt
Documentation/git-show-ref.txt
Documentation/git-stripspace.txt
Documentation/git-unpack-objects.txt
builtin/cat-file.c
builtin/check-attr.c
builtin/check-ignore.c
builtin/commit-tree.c
builtin/get-tar-commit-id.c
builtin/hash-object.c
builtin/mktag.c
builtin/patch-id.c
builtin/show-ref.c
builtin/stripspace.c
builtin/unpack-objects.c
show-index.c