git: short status with NUL-terminated names AND relative paths

Question

I want to get git output in the format status -s :

genesis% git status -s .
?? .config/aria2/
?? .config/htop/
?? .config/mc/
?? .config/pacman/
?? .config/remmina/
?? .config/teamviewer/
?? .config/zsh/

But I want this list with `\\0' terminated filenames to safely deal with files with weird characters in their names.

genesis% git status -z . | xargs -0n1 echo
?? misc/.config/aria2/
?? misc/.config/htop/
?? misc/.config/mc/
?? misc/.config/pacman/
?? misc/.config/remmina/
?? misc/.config/teamviewer/
?? misc/.config/zsh/

As you can see, the -z output gives paths relative to the repository root (the additional misc ).

How can I get the relative pathnames like in the first example but still have them NUL -terminated?

Answer 1

You can't quite get what you want directly. However, since -z is intended for consumption by code rather than humans, you can add a bit of your own code to do what you want, using git rev-parse --show-cdup :

$ git rev-parse --show-cdup
../

This says that there is one top level component "missing" from the current working directory, so after you get your limited-to-current-directory entries via -z , you should strip off the first component of each name. If --show-cdup printed ../../ you would need to strip off two, and so on.

Note that --show-cdup prints nothing—or more precisely, a blank line—when there are no components to strip off. Hence, counting the number of ../ (or even just / ) in --show-cdup 's output gives you the correct number of leading path name components to strip.

(If you're providing some argument other than . to git status , you'll need even more: test whether the argument is a directory, if so cd into it and run git rev-parse --show-cdup , and if it's a file, get its dirname or . , cd into that, and run git rev-parse --show-cdup . Do all this from a subprocess to avoid modifying the current working directory of the main process. This rather convoluted method avoids having to write path name resolvers to handle arbitrary numbers of ./ and ../ components, but you can also go the other route and go straight for full hard paths with realpath , assuming POSIX-like environments anyway.)