Re: fatal from submodule status --recursive when used with grep -q

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

> On 16/09/2024 16:08, Matt Liberty wrote:
>> If I try to grep the output I get a fatal error:
>> % git submodule status --recursive | grep -q "^+"
>> fatal: failed to recurse into submodule 'tools/OpenROAD'
>> I didn't expect any output but did want the return status (0).  I'm
>> guessing git is unhappy that grep -q exits on the first occurrence of
>> the pattern.  I don't feel fatal is appropriate here.
>
> I assume git is dying with SIGPIPE. As the only purpose of "git
> submodule status" is to write the status information to stdout that
> sounds reasonable. If you want to collect the exit status you need to
> consume the whole output so that the command runs to completion.

Yes, but isn't the main point of that complaint that "failed to
recurse into" is not a good way to say "because you closed the
reading end of the pipe, we are aborting the operation and not
decending into 'tools/OpenROAD' submodule", is it?