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  • Junio C Hamano's avatar
    usage: do not insist that standard input must come from a file · 33e8fc87
    Junio C Hamano authored
    
    
    The synopsys text and the usage string of subcommands that read list
    of things from the standard input are often shown like this:
    
    	git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes>
    
    This is problematic in a number of ways:
    
     * The way to use these commands is more often to feed them the
       output from another command, not feed them from a file.
    
     * Manual pages outside Git, commands that operate on the data read
       from the standard input, e.g "sort", "grep", "sed", etc., are not
       described with such a "< redirection-from-file" in their synopsys
       text.  Our doing so introduces inconsistency.
    
     * We do not insist on where the output should go, by saying
    
    	git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes> > <output>
    
     * As it is our convention to enclose placeholders inside <braket>,
       the redirection operator followed by a placeholder filename
       becomes very hard to read, both in the documentation and in the
       help text.
    
    Let's clean them all up, after making sure that the documentation
    clearly describes the modes that take information from the standard
    input and what kind of things are expected on the input.
    
    [jc: stole example for fmt-merge-msg from Jonathan]
    
    Helped-by: default avatarJonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    33e8fc87