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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

wait wait wait... are you saying that having an executable at ~/bin/git-co-commit will automatically create `git co-commit`? Wouldn't it merely create a 'git-co-commit' command you can access as that user as long as it's in your $PATH? What is integrating it in the `git` program?? Or was it just a typo in your example and you actually type `git-co-commit` and not `git co-commit`?

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Git will automatically prefix a subcommand with `git-` and try to execute a command with that name.

https://blog.sebastian-daschner.com/entries/custom-git-subco...

Many "built-in" Git commands are themselves separate executables. My Linux machine has them in `/usr/lib/git-core/`, and my macOS machine has them in `/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/libexec/git-core/`.

yep! all git subcommands are separate binaries. Check out `ls /usr/lib/git-core` (that's the path on my machine). Or you can `locate git-add` or something to check where they're located on your machine. I have a tiny fzf script called `git select` to give me a nice interface for selecting branches I've recently worked on. Just call the script `git-select` and stick it somewhere in your path. In the spirit of this question, my one is here:

  !/bin/zsh

  alias git_my_branches="git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(HEAD) %(color:yellow)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) - %(color:red)%(objectname:short)%(color:reset) - %(contents:subject) - %(authorname) (%(color:green)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset))'"

  local selected_branch=$(git_my_branches --color | fzf --ansi --tac | awk '{print $1}')
  if [ "$selected_branch" != '*' ]; then
          git checkout $selected_branch
  fi

I had the same reaction!... but just tested it and lo and behold it works!

    [user@user ~]# cat > ~/bin/git-test-me <<'EOF'
    #!/bin/bash
    
    echo hi
    EOF
    [user@user ~]# chmod +x ~/bin/git-test-me
    [user@user ~]# git test-me
    hi

As others mentioned, yes! If you’re curious on how it works I write a sort of deep-dive on the git internals of how this works: https://nathancraddock.com/blog/2022/custom-git-commands/

Correct. Git will try to run a built in subcommand, and if it doesn't exist, it'll fall back to trying to run `git-some-command`.

Many Linux tools do this. Rust's cargo is another.

In fact, `man` itself can take multiple positional arguments and will concatenate them with a hyphen to perform the lookup.

Try 'strace git blah', it will be educational.

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