How to change the git directory delimiter?

Question

When working inside a windows command prompt, all of my paths indicate director separators with a backslash \, when using GIT commands, all of the paths are instead using forwardslash /. How do I change GIT's output to mirror my command line output?

Example inconsistent directory indicators;

D:\git\demo>git status --s A test/subdir/foo.txt

Adding the tools within git\usr\bin to my path and using them from the command line is a work around, but I still run into problems when I attempt to copy paths from the command line into other windows application's open file dialog. — Peter Nied
– Peter Nied, Commented Jan 6, 2017 at 18:33
Why do you need to change it? git bash is unix while cmd is windows. — CodeWizard
– CodeWizard, Commented Jan 7, 2017 at 2:41
windows commands such as erase or rmdir do not work with '/' delimited file paths — Peter Nied
– Peter Nied, Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 18:22
Most Windows commands are quite okay with slash-delimited paths, just as long as they don't begin with a slash. The underlying APIs are fully compatible with forward slashes. I recommend using forward slashes, and then seeking help the other way ("Such-and-such can't use file names like test/subdir/foo.txt - how can I work around this?"). Otherwise you're going to spend all your time fighting against git and bash. — rosuav
– rosuav, Commented Feb 7, 2017 at 11:11

VonC · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-01 20:17:33Z

How do I change GIT's output to mirror my command line output?

First, all git commands are executed in a git bash sub-shell, which explains why you see '/'. A '\' is an escape character for a bash session, which is why it is not used in any bash command output.

You would need to use a git wrapper (a git.pat set in your PATH) in order to replace any / by \.

git.bat:

C:\prgs\git\latest\bin\git.exe %*|C:\prgs\git\latest\usr\bin\sed.exe -e 's:/:\\\\:'

Make sure git.bat is set before git.exe in your %PATH%: type where git to check the order in which git(s) are discovered.
And replace C:\prgs\git\latest by the path your Git is installed.

By specifying the full path for git.exe and for sed.exe, you are sure to use the right executable.

Just to nitpick, I don't believe git runs everything in bash -- it's just that git.exe is built against mingw.
Coloration is lost, and since it is just a regex, it matches any / in the output on non-path elements :(
@PeterNied Yes, it is a workaround: Git remains at its core a Linux tool.
@PeterNied Do you have a specific issue which would require for you to get Git output with \ instead of /?
@VonC windows commands such as erase or rmdir do not work with '/' delimited file paths, which I would like to be taking from the ouput of git log --stat or git status

Pockets · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-06 02:18:53Z

Since what you're looking for seems to be not specifically "how do I make Git use \ in file paths" but rather "how do I make Git generate file paths with \", you can pipe the output through sed (which is packaged in Git Bash) like so:

$ git status --s | sed 's/\//\\/g' M dir\file.py ?? dir\input001.txt ?? dir\output001.txt

and to avoid typing sed every single time you can configure a Git alias to do it for you:

[alias] ws = "!ws() { : git status ; git status --short $@ | sed 's/\\//\\\\/g' ; } && ws"

which will let you do this:

$ git ws M dir\file.py ?? dir\input001.txt ?? dir\output001.txt

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