cannot bind complex external commands

[thomasjachmann]

I want to add a binding to put the current commit hash into the system's clipboard (Mac OS X), so here's my .gitconfig

[tig "bind"]
    main = c !echo "%(commit)" | pbcopy

The output of this is:

9c118dcfea9a65ed668bf26e1984544a0bb083fa | pbcopy

So my assumption is that everything after the first space is treated as a parameter and passed to the command before the first space. This isn't a pbcopy issue, the following also doesn't work:

[tig "bind"]
    main = c !echo "%(commit)" > sha1.txt

This outputs (no file created):

9c118dcfea9a65ed668bf26e1984544a0bb083fa > sha1.txt

[richo]

The external command is run with execv so shell pipelines won't work.

You can either do

sh -c "9c118dcfea9a65ed668bf26e1984544a0bb083fa | pbcopy"

Which will work or make the command a git alias or somesuch.

[thomasjachmann]

The sh trick didn't work, I already tried that:

[tig "bind"]
    main = 1 !`sh -c "%(commit) | pbcopy"`
    main = 2 !`sh -c "echo %(commit) | pbcopy"`
    main = 3 !`sh -c "echo '%(commit)' | pbcopy"`
    main = 4 !sh -c "%(commit) | pbcopy"
    main = 5 !sh -c "echo %(commit) | pbcopy"
    main = 6 !sh -c "echo '%(commit)' | pbcopy"

None of those put anything in the clipboard, the first three didn't have any output, the 5th and 6th had an empty line as output, and the 4th:

|: db4d7c3b175aa504c8e880deb1fad278eae30058: command not found

But this worked:

[alias]
    pbcopy = !sh -c 'echo $1 | pbcopy' -
[tig "bind"]
    main = 7 !@git pbcopy %(commit)

I can work with that, thank you for the suggestion! But certainly it is a complex workaround. Shouldn't something a bit more complex (but surely not highly sophisticated) work with bindings?

[richo]

I'll have a look at it at some point and see if it's workable to execute aliases in a subshell (which would let things like pipelines and output redirection work).

Ultimately, it's @jonas' call anyway, I'm just an interested party and don't have any sway in the project.

[thomasjachmann]

That's cool. I've got it working for now thanks to your hint. And maybe it's getting even easier in future versions.

[vivien]

I've already run into this issue, a solution can be to use system() if the command contains a pipe:

https://gist.github.com/2883502
EDIT: I put it in a gist because it wasn't readable.

With this, bindings such as bind main c !@echo %(commit) | xclip work great.
@jonas, what do you think?

[jonas]

Tig originally supported this kind of bindings. It was changed in 10b1023 to stream-line general IO handling. See line 2818

We can reintroduce it if a majority finds it useful and somebody is ready to submit a patch. Just make sure that you properly shell quote all the arguments passed to system(). See a6113cb for the original sq_quote() lifted from git.=

[vspinu]

Actually would be very nice to have the suggested clipboard action as a core tig functionality. But I guess it's a very OS dependent issue.

[jonas]

With the above commit you can now bind a key to update the clipboard with the commit ID, for example:

bind generic I !@sh -c "echo -n %(commit) | xclip -selection c"

[linduxed]

I'm not sure how long ago (about half a year, would be my guess), but this exact command that @jonas posted does not work anymore.

I tried a couple of different commands and my conclusion is that %(commit) returns an empty string. I have not investigated the code to figure out what could be causing this.

[koutcher]

See #986.

[bigunyak]

This works just fine for my in Linux.

[tig "bind"]
    generic = Y !@sh -c \"echo -n %(commit) | xclip -selection c\"

But on Mac this is not working.

[tig "bind"]
    generic = Y !@sh -c \"echo -n %(commit) | pbcopy\"

It prints -n a0s981125b1b3fd7889eu5284b0f066cdc6e4c90 with a trailing new line.
Do you know how to fix it?

tig version 2.5.0
ncurses version 5.7.20081102
readline version 8.0

[koutcher]

echo -n is generally not very portable, prefer printf.

[wsakernel]

Can't this be closed? I have an external command with a pipe embedded in 'sh -c' in my tigrc and it works nicely. It is also more explicitly documented with 2fb8025