Question

I tried to make an alias for committing several different git projects. I tried something like

cat projectPaths | \
xargs -I project git --git-dir=project/.git --work-tree=project commit -a

where projectPaths is a file containing the paths to all the projects I want to commit. This seems to work for the most part, firing up vi in sequence for each project so that I can write a commit msg for it. I do, however, get a msg:

“Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal”

and afterward my terminal is weird: it doesn’t show the text I type and doesn’t seem to output any newlines. When I enter “reset” things pretty much back to normal, but clearly I’m doing something wrong.

Is there some way to get the same behavior without messing up my shell?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The problem is that since you’re running xargs (and hence git and hence vim) in a pipeline, its stdin is taken from the output of cat projectPaths rather than the terminal; this is confusing vim. Fortunately, the solution is simple: add the -o flag to xargs, and it’ll start git (and hence vim) with input from /dev/tty, instead of its own stdin.