Misc

Writing consistent commit messages helps you to weave a coherent story with your git history. Recently, I’ve started paying attention to my commit messages. Before this, my commit messages in this repository used to look like this:

git log --oneline -5

d058a23 (HEAD -> master) bash strict mode
a62e59b Updating functool partials til.
532b21a Added functool partials til
ec9191c added unfinished indexing script
18e41c8 Bash tils

With all the misuse of letter casings and punctuations, clearly, the message formatting is all over the place. To tame this mayhem, I’ve adopted these 7 rules of writing great commit messages:

Pasting shell commands can be a pain when they include hidden return \n characters. In such a case, your shell will try to execute the command immediately. To prevent that, use curly braces { <cmd> } while pasting the command. Your command should look like the following:

{ dig +short google.com }

Here, the spaces after the braces are significant.

Use unofficial bash strict mode while writing scripts. Bash has a few gotchas and this helps you to avoid that. For example:

#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

echo "Hello"

Where,

-e              Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
-u              Treat unset variables as an error when substituting.
-o pipefail     The return value of a pipeline is the status of
                the last command to exit with a non-zero status,
                or zero if no command exited with a non-zero status.

Further reading

• Unofficial bash strict mode