How to launch a Bash function using Git alias

Question

I want to use a Git alias in ~/.gitconfig so that it calls a bash function, if it is defined, otherwise call the regular git checkout.

This is what I have devised:

cat ~/.gitconfig
...
[alias]
...
    co = !(compgen -A function vxzExecuteGitCheckout >/dev/null && vxzExecuteGitCheckout ) || git checkout

The problem is that Git uses /bin/sh (which happens to be dash in my case) and it barfs on compgen since it is a bash builtin.

Any way making sure that Git uses bash to execute this command?

Note that vxzExecuteGitCheckout() is defined in a file which is not included in ~/.bashrc, yet.

Another question is, if I were to use git co -b param1 param2 ..., would the above alias definition pass on the -b param1 param2 to git checkout if this Bash function is not found?

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:45:20Z

4

use bash explicitely:

co = !bash -c '( compgen -A function vxzExecuteGitCheckout >/dev/null && vxzExecuteGitCheckout ) || git checkout' -

another possibility would be to write a shell script with the correct shebang line #!/bin/bash and call that script for alias.co (see the question How to embed bash script directly inside a git alias)

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:45

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answered Jun 26, 2011 at 11:20

knittl

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6 Comments

Gurjeet Singh Over a year ago

Thanks, that helped. Used this: <br>

co = !bash -c '(compgen -A function vxzExecuteGitCheckout >/dev/null && vxzExecuteGitCheckout "$@" ) || git checkout "$@"' -

You might want to explain the importance of trailing dash, because without it the git co command seemed to do nothing at all.

Gurjeet Singh Over a year ago

I finally ditched this approach because I wanted the called function vxz... to change the environment variables of the shell I am working in. But since this function gets called in new shell of its own, the environment variable changes do not affect the calling shell.

knittl Over a year ago

@gurjeet: any chance we might know the problem you're trying to solve? maybe there's another way around it

Steve Over a year ago

does anyone know what the trailing dash is for, beacuase without it, it doesn't work?

knittl Over a year ago

@Steve: from man bash: »If there are arguments after the command_string, the first argument is assigned to $0 and any remaining arguments are assigned to the positional parameters. The assignment to $0 sets the name of the shell, which is used in warning and error messages.«

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