What is the point of adding an exclamation mark before git add?

Question

I'm looking at the dotfile for git aliases here . Why is there an exclamation mark before the git add ? And looking at other aliases, quite a few use ! , in the formal of $alias_name$ = "!..." . Are the two uses different?

I looked up some bash uses of ! and it seems to be used to get previous commands, but this use seems to be different. Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

! is not before git add , it's before the entire command line. It means "run the command with a shell". Git aliases are usually simple substitutions:

[alias]
ca = commit -a

means that the command git ca will be interpreted by git as git commit -a .

For more complex tricks in aliases people use shell commands and functions, and ! calls shell. For the alias you pointed to it means that git ca will execute

git add -A && git commit -av

in a shell.

Answer 2

The '!' is used to tell that the command that is between the double quotes is not a git command. The command will use one of the many command line executable installed on your system.

Indeed, you could call the git executable, so that this 2 alias are the same :

 st = "status" 

 st = "!git status"