Re: \b character escapes in CLI usage

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2025-02-26 at 07:38:22, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 11:44:33PM +0000, Yaakov Smith wrote:
> > When using "git config --list" however, this is emitted in its raw format, and can be used to mask or hide an actual (probably invalid) value:
> > 
> > $ cat .git/config
> > [core]
> >         somevalue = "true\b\b\b\bfalse"
> > $ git config --local --list
> > core.somevalue=false
> 
> But here, the point of "git config" is to show the output. If we
> sanitized it (especially in a lossy way like we do for error messages),
> then any program reading the output would not see the real data.

Yes, I should point out that, among other programs, Git LFS reads this
output.  Changing the output format would break those programs.

> > Should "git config" be smarter here and print something other than a
> > literal backspace to the terminal, like "git fetch" does?
> 
> So I would say no here, in general.

I agree this is the right choice in general.  I wonder if we might want
some sort of human-readable output option that might escape these that
users could use.  The output might still be machine-readable, but it
might be easier to parse than the current format, which has some tricky
edge cases when a config value contains newlines.

We already have precedent for this in core.quotePath and could easily
use similar logic here.  That format, while using octal, which I find
ugly and hard to read, does have the pleasant side effect that it works
correctly with POSIX printf(1) (which I'm sure was intentional), unlike
hex escapes.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them or he/him)
Toronto, Ontario, CA

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