I have seen colleagues using git add -A :/
for staging files in repositories, but I am unable to find what that does in the documentation. What am I missing?
(This answer originally talked about refspecs, which turned out to be irrelevant and incorrect.)
As lrineau's answer correctly points out, the :
character in this case is part of the syntax of a pathspec.
Documentation on pathspecs is annoyingly difficult to find, but there's a "gitglossary" man page, available either by typing man gitglossary
or visiting this web page.
The relevant part:
A pathspec that begins with a colon
:
has special meaning. In the short form, the leading colon:
is followed by zero or more "magic signature" letters (which optionally is terminated by another colon :), and the remainder is the pattern to match against the path. The optional colon that terminates the "magic signature" can be omitted if the pattern begins with a character that cannot be a "magic signature" and is not a colon.In the long form ... [snip].
The "magic signature" consists of an ASCII symbol that is not alphanumeric.
top /
The magic wordtop
(mnemonic:/
) makes the pattern match from the root of the working tree, even when you are running the command from inside a subdirectory.
The conclusion is the same as in my original answer: :/
refers to the root directory of the current working tree.
As you already know the -A
option, let's talk about git add :/
only. According to the documentation of git-add, the last argument is a pathspec. The definition of it is in the documentation of gitglossary. Let me quote the releant parts (I put the important sentences in bold):
A pathspec that begins with a colon : has special meaning. In the short form, the leading colon : is followed by zero or more "magic signature" letters (which optionally is terminated by another colon :), and the remainder is the pattern to match against the path. The optional colon that terminates the "magic signature" can be omitted if the pattern begins with a character that cannot be a "magic signature" and is not a colon.
In the long form, the leading colon : is followed by a open parenthesis (, a comma-separated list of zero or more "magic words", and a close parentheses ), and the remainder is the pattern to match against the path.
The "magic signature" consists of an ASCII symbol that is not alphanumeric.
top /
The magic word top (mnemonic: /) makes the pattern match from the root of the working tree, even when you are running the command from inside a subdirectory.
Currently only the slash / is recognized as the "magic signature", but it is envisioned that we will support more types of magic in later versions of git.
You can see that if a pathspec begins by :/
or :(top)
then that part of the pathspec is by definition the root of the working tree.
git add :/
stages all files in the working tree.