On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 01:21:29PM +0530, Kaartic Sivaraam wrote:
> I made a small assumption in the script which turned out to be false. I
> thought the unicode prefixes I used corresponded to only two bytes.
> This lead to the issue. The unicode character '✓' corresponds to three
> characters and as a result instead of removing it, my script replaced
> it with the unknown character '�'. So, the branch named '✓doc-fix'
> became 'done/�doc-fix'. Here's the issue. I couldn't use
>
> $ git branch -m done/�doc-fix done/dic-fix
>
> to rename the branch. Nor could I refer to it in anyway. Git simply
> says,
>
> error: pathspec 'done/�doc-fix' did not match any file(s) known to git.
What does "git for-each-ref" say about which branches you _do_ have?
Also, what platform are you on?
I'm wondering specifically if you have a filesystem (like HFS+ on MacOS)
that silently rewrites invalid unicode in filenames we create. That
would mean your branches are still there, but probably with some funny
filename like "done/%xxdoc-fix". Git wouldn't know that name because the
filesystem rewriting happened behinds its back (though I'd think that a
further open() call would find the same file, so maybe this is barking
up the wrong tree).
Another line of thinking: are you sure the � you are writing on the
command line is identical to the one generated by the corruption (and if
you cut and paste, is perhaps a generic glyph placed in the buffer by
your terminal to replace an invalid codepoint, rather than the actual
bytes)?
> I just wanted to know why git accepted a branch name which it can't
> identify later?
>
> If it had rejected that name in the first place it would have been
> better. In case you would like to know how I got that weird name,
> here's a way to get that
>
> $ echo '✓doc-fix' | cut -c3-100
[a few defines to make it easy to prod git]
$ check=$(printf '\342\234\223')
$ broken=$(printf '\223')
[this is your starting state, a branch with the unicode name]
$ git branch ${check}doc-fix
[you didn't say how your script works, so let's use git to rename]
$ git branch -m ${check}doc-fix ${broken}doc-fix
[my terminal doesn't show the unknown-character glyph, but we
can see the funny character with "cat -A"]:
$ git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' | cat -A
refs/heads/master$
refs/heads/M-^Sdoc-fix$
[and we can rename it using that knowledge]
$ git branch ${broken}doc-fix doc-fix
-Peff
