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The GIT command line is actually useful

Posted by Dominic Cronin at Jan 25, 2015 05:50 PM |
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I tend to use a mix of GIT clients. Tortoise GIT is probably my main workhorse, as most of the time, managing my work via Windows Explorer is a pretty good model. Some people at the office are keen on Atlassian SourceTree, so I'll probably end up using that on projects where that's the standard tooling. Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 works pretty well with GIT, and there are plug-ins for earlier versions.

So why would I ever need a command line client, you might ask? And yet, I habitually also install GIT for Windows, (and trust me, it's not because I need another graphical client). I actually like having a command line client around, as I sometimes have the idea that some things might be simpler that way. I'm also scratching an itch to always learn a couple of ways of doing something, but realistically, I don't invest much effort in learning the command line, but I like to have it around, just in case... even at the cost of occasionally having to fend off accusations that I'm just trying to be some kind of geek..... <sigh>

And then, one day at work this week, it actually turned out that the command line was the only way to get the job done. I needed to clone a repository that was on a remote machine on a file share. Should be easy you'd think, but the remote location needed to be specified as a UNC address, and Tortoise GIT just wouldn't cope with the syntax.

So I reached for the command line, and after some cursory research it turned out what I needed to do was:

git remote add blah //SERVERNAME/c$/code/Blah

Once I'd done that, I could continue to use Tortoise, as the "blah" repository just showed up in the list...

So there you have it. I am completely justified and vindicated in keeping this software on my computers. :-) Maybe I'll practice a bit more and find some other good reasons to keep it around.

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