GITCLI(7)

💖 NAME 💖

gitcli — Git command-line interface and conventions. Okay so this is gitcli(7), bestie — the page where Git explains its command-line vibes, rules, and little conventions so you don’t get humbled by ambiguity in the terminal 💅.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

gitcli

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

This manual describes the convention used throughout Git CLI. Lowkey essential reading if you want your Git commands to be iconic instead of chaotic 🎀.

Many commands take revisions (most often “commits”, but sometimes “tree-ish”, depending on the context and command) and paths as their arguments. Here are the rules:

Options come first, then args. A subcommand may take dashed options (which may take their own arguments, e.g. --max-parents 2) and arguments. You SHOULD give dashed options first and then arguments. Some commands may accept dashed options after you have already given non-option arguments (which may make the command ambiguous), but you should not rely on it (because eventually we may find a way to fix these ambiguities by enforcing the “options then args” rule). No cap, just put the options first 🫶.
Revisions come first, then paths. E.g. in git diff v1.0 v2.0 arch/x86 include/asm-x86, v1.0 and v2.0 are revisions and arch/x86 and include/asm-x86 are paths. It’s giving “revision girlies to the front” ✨.
When an argument can be misunderstood as either a revision or a path, disambiguate by placing -- between them. E.g. git diff -- HEAD is, “I have a file called HEAD in my work tree. Please show changes between the version I staged in the index and what I have in the work tree for that file”, not “show the difference between the HEAD commit and the work tree as a whole”. You can say git diff HEAD -- to ask for the latter. The -- is literally the main character here 👑.
Without disambiguating --, Git makes a reasonable guess, but errors out and asks you to disambiguate when ambiguous. E.g. if you have a file called HEAD in your work tree, git diff HEAD is ambiguous, and you have to say either git diff HEAD -- or git diff -- HEAD to disambiguate. Git is not being mean, it’s just doing a vibe check 🧚.
Because -- disambiguates revisions and paths in some commands, it cannot be used for those commands to separate options and revisions. You can use --end-of-options for this (it also works for commands that do not distinguish between revisions in paths, in which case it is simply an alias for --). When writing a script that is expected to handle random user-input, it is a good practice to make it explicit which arguments are which by placing disambiguating -- at appropriate places. Script bestie behavior, fr fr 🎀.
Many commands allow wildcards in paths, but you need to protect them from getting globbed by the shell. These two mean different things:

$ git restore *.c
$ git restore \*.c

The former lets your shell expand the fileglob, and you are asking the dot-C files in your working tree to be overwritten with the version in the index. The latter passes the *.c to Git, and you are asking the paths in the index that match the pattern to be checked out to your working tree. After running git add hello.c; rm hello.c, you will not see hello.c in your working tree with the former, but with the latter you will. Shell globbing is lowkey sneaky like that 😭.

Just as the filesystem . (period) refers to the current directory, using a . as a repository name in Git (a dot-repository) is a relative path and means your current repository. Cute and relative, just like your current directory 💜.

Here are the rules regarding the “flags” that you should follow when you are scripting Git:

Splitting short options to separate words (prefer git foo -a -b to git foo -ab, the latter may not even work). Slay the combined short options when you’re scripting ✨.
When a command-line option takes an argument, use the stuck form. In other words, write git foo -oArg instead of git foo -o Arg for short options, and git foo --long-opt=Arg instead of git foo --long-opt Arg for long options. An option that takes optional option-argument must be written in the stuck form. Stuck form is the moment, no cap 💅.
Despite the above suggestion, when Arg is a path relative to the home directory of a user, e.g. ~/directory/file or ~u/d/f, you may want to use the separate form, e.g. git foo --file ~/mine, not git foo --file=~/mine. The shell will expand ~/ in the former to your home directory, but most shells keep the tilde in the latter. Some of our commands know how to tilde-expand the option value even when given in the stuck form, but not all of them do. Tilde drama, honestly 🙈.
When you give a revision parameter to a command, make sure the parameter is not ambiguous with a name of a file in the work tree. E.g. do not write git log -1 HEAD but write git log -1 HEAD --; the former will not work if you happen to have a file called HEAD in the work tree. This is the classic “why is my perfectly good command acting up” moment 💀.
Many commands allow a long option --option to be abbreviated only to their unique prefix (e.g. if there is no other option whose name begins with opt, you may be able to spell --opt to invoke the --option flag), but you should fully spell them out when writing your scripts; later versions of Git may introduce a new option whose name shares the same prefix, e.g. --optimize, to make a short prefix that used to be unique no longer unique. Future-proof your scripts, bestie 🔥.

🌈 ENHANCED OPTION PARSER 🌈

From the Git 1.5.4 series and further, many Git commands (not all of them at the time of the writing though) come with an enhanced option parser.

Here is a list of the facilities provided by this option parser.

💫 Magic Options 💫

Commands which have the enhanced option parser activated all understand a couple of magic command-line options:

-h — gives a pretty printed usage of the command.

$ git describe -h
usage: git describe [<options>] <commit-ish>*
   or: git describe [<options>] --dirty

    --contains            find the tag that comes after the commit
    --debug               debug search strategy on stderr
    --all                 use any ref
    --tags                use any tag, even unannotated
    --long                always use long format
    --abbrev[=<n>]        use <n> digits to display SHA-1s

Note that some subcommand (e.g. git grep) may behave differently when there are things on the command line other than -h, but git subcmd -h without anything else on the command line is meant to consistently give the usage. It’s giving “help me help you” energy 🫶.

--help-all — Some Git commands take options that are only used for plumbing or that are deprecated, and such options are hidden from the default usage. This option gives the full list of options. The hidden lore, unlocked ✨.

🚫 Negating options 🚫

Options with long option names can be negated by prefixing --no-. For example, git branch has the option --track which is on by default. You can use --no-track to override that behaviour. The same goes for --color and --no-color. Say no with a long option prefix, iconic 💅.

👑 Options trump configuration and environment 👑

When there is a configuration variable or an environment variable that tweak the behaviour of an aspect of a Git command, and also a command line option that tweaks the same, the command line option overrides what the configuration and/or environment variable say. Command line stays winning, periodt 👑.

For example, the user.name configuration variable is used to specify the human-readable name used by the git commit command to record the author and the committer name in a newly created commit. The GIT_AUTHOR_NAME environment variable, if set, takes precedence when deciding what author name to record. The --author=<author> command line option of the git commit command, when given, takes precedence over these two sources of information. Hierarchy! Main character energy from the CLI option 🌟.

🧩 Aggregating short options 🧩

Commands that support the enhanced option parser allow you to aggregate short options. This means that you can for example use git rm -rf or git clean -fdx. Short option stack, slay 🧚.

✂️ Abbreviating long options ✂️

Commands that support the enhanced option parser accepts unique prefix of a long option as if it is fully spelled out, but use this with a caution. For example, git commit --amen behaves as if you typed git commit --amend, but that is true only until a later version of Git introduces another option that shares the same prefix, e.g. git commit --amenity option. Cute shortcut, but don’t get too attached 😭.

🍓 Separating argument from the option 🍓

You can write the mandatory option parameter to an option as a separate word on the command line. That means that all the following uses work:

$ git foo --long-opt=Arg
$ git foo --long-opt Arg
$ git foo -oArg
$ git foo -o Arg

However, this is NOT allowed for switches with an optional value, where the stuck form must be used:

$ git describe --abbrev HEAD     # correct
$ git describe --abbrev=10 HEAD  # correct
$ git describe --abbrev 10 HEAD  # NOT WHAT YOU MEANT

Optional-value switches said “stuck form or nothing,” and honestly valid 💅.

🎀 Magic filename options 🎀

Options that take a filename allow a prefix :(optional). For example:

git commit -F :(optional)COMMIT_EDITMSG
# if COMMIT_EDITMSG does not exist, the above is equivalent to
git commit

Like with configuration values, if the named file is missing Git behaves as if the option was not given at all. See “Values” in git-config(1). Missing file? No problem, the option just ghosts the command ✨.

✨ NOTES ON FREQUENTLY CONFUSED OPTIONS ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the part where everybody gets it wrong 😭

So there's a whole bunch of commands that can vibe with files in the working tree and/or in the index, right? Those commands can take --cached and/or --index. And sometimes people see these two and go "oh, they're synonyms, because the index used to be called the cache 💅". They are NOT synonyms. No cap. These two options mean very different things, and mixing them up is giving "I didn't read the docs" energy.

--cached — this one tells a command that usually works on files in the working tree to only work with the index instead. Like git grep? When you don't give it a commit to say which commit to hunt strings in, it normally searches the files in the working tree. But with --cached, it goes looking for strings in the index instead. Iconic behaviour, honestly.
--index — this one is different, bestie. It tells a command that usually works on files in the working tree to also affect the index. Example: git stash apply normally merges the changes recorded in a stash entry into the working tree, right? But with --index, it merges the changes into the index too. Both places. Overachiever behaviour 🫶

And then there's git apply — that one can be used with --cached and --index, but not at the same time 🙈. Usually the command only affects files in the working tree. But with --index, it patches both the files and their index entries, and with --cached, it modifies only the index entries. See the difference? Literally the whole point.

See also these two links for further info, iykyk:

Some other commands that also work on files in the working tree and/or in the index can take --staged and/or --worktree. Yes, more options, I know, but these ones are cute and consistent:

--staged — exactly like --cached. Like, exactly. It asks a command to only work on the index, not the working tree. Same energy, different nickname 🌸
--worktree — the opposite one! It asks a command to work on the working tree only, not the index. Main character of the working tree, index stays home 💅
--staged + --worktree together — you can specify both at once to ask a command to work on both the index and the working tree. Best of both worlds, we love to see it ✨

👑 GIT 👑

Part of the git(1) suite

aaaand that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 you made it to the end, I'm so proud. this one's from Git 2.56.0, dated 2026-09-27, and it lives at GITCLI(7) in the manual pages. go forth and never confuse --cached with --index again, fr fr 💖🦋

📦 where this page comes from

arch rolling: git 2.56.0-1 · GPL-2.0-only
💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on 2026-11-06: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms