Question

When I try to create an alias

[alias]
    my-alias = submodule foreach 'git foo ; git bar'

Git (version 1.7.1) spews the error

user@host:/path/repo.git$ git my-alias
error: unclosed quote
fatal: Bad alias.my-alias string

It appears that .gitconfig uses weird parsing rules, so that ; is treated as starting a line comment, even inside of a quote.

How do I specify this alias?

Answer 1

Wrap the entire alias command in double quotes:

my-alias = "submodule foreach 'git foo ; git bar'"

The double quotes cause the .gitconfig parser to pass the semicolon. The single quotes are still needed to delimit the argument to submodule foreach; without them, it gets parsed as

submodule foreach 'git foo'
git bar

so that git bar only gets executed once, at the end.