Update documentation for stripspace

Tell the user what this command is intended for, and expand the
description of what it does.

Signed-off-by: Conrad Irwin <conrad.irwin@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

diff --git a/Documentation/git-stripspace.txt b/Documentation/git-stripspace.txt
index b78f031cd4464b21be145d4ffa79ff39dc8bd2bb..a80d94650d3a6b724dc68aac18fd562ff38d2cf8 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/git-stripspace.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-stripspace.txt
@@ -3,26 +3,83 @@ git-stripspace(1)
 
 NAME
 ----
-git-stripspace - Filter out empty lines
+git-stripspace - Remove unnecessary whitespace
 
 
 SYNOPSIS
 --------
 [verse]
-'git stripspace' [-s | --strip-comments] < <stream>
+'git stripspace' [-s | --strip-comments] < input
 
 DESCRIPTION
 -----------
-Remove multiple empty lines, and empty lines at beginning and end.
+
+Clean the input in the manner used by 'git' for text such as commit
+messages, notes, tags and branch descriptions.
+
+With no arguments, this will:
+
+- remove trailing whitespace from all lines
+- collapse multiple consecutive empty lines into one empty line
+- remove empty lines from the beginning and end of the input
+- add a missing '\n' to the last line if necessary.
+
+In the case where the input consists entirely of whitespace characters, no
+output will be produced.
+
+*NOTE*: This is intended for cleaning metadata, prefer the `--whitespace=fix`
+mode of linkgit:git-apply[1] for correcting whitespace of patches or files in
+the repository.
 
 OPTIONS
 -------
 -s::
 --strip-comments::
-       In addition to empty lines, also strip lines starting with '#'.
+       Skip and remove all lines starting with '#'.
+
+EXAMPLES
+--------
+
+Given the following noisy input with '$' indicating the end of a line:
 
-<stream>::
-       Byte stream to act on.
+--------
+|A brief introduction   $
+|   $
+|$
+|A new paragraph$
+|# with a commented-out line    $
+|explaining lots of stuff.$
+|$
+|# An old paragraph, also commented-out. $
+|      $
+|The end.$
+|  $
+---------
+
+Use 'git stripspace' with no arguments to obtain:
+
+--------
+|A brief introduction$
+|$
+|A new paragraph$
+|# with a commented-out line$
+|explaining lots of stuff.$
+|$
+|# An old paragraph, also commented-out.$
+|$
+|The end.$
+---------
+
+Use 'git stripspace --strip-comments' to obtain:
+
+--------
+|A brief introduction$
+|$
+|A new paragraph$
+|explaining lots of stuff.$
+|$
+|The end.$
+---------
 
 GIT
 ---

diff --git a/builtin/stripspace.c b/builtin/stripspace.c
index 1288ffcc52530f8ef9561acd2eb2ec5322c9e230..f16986c0ae811f6b998d20be39da1af6095fcfe8 100644 (file)
--- a/builtin/stripspace.c
+++ b/builtin/stripspace.c
@@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ int cmd_stripspace(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
                                !strcmp(argv[1], "--strip-comments")))
                strip_comments = 1;
        else if (argc > 1)
-               usage("git stripspace [-s | --strip-comments] < <stream>");
+               usage("git stripspace [-s | --strip-comments] < input");
 
        if (strbuf_read(&buf, 0, 1024) < 0)
                die_errno("could not read the input");