Documentation/config/alias.txt

alias.*::
	Command aliases for the linkgit:git[1] command wrapper - e.g.
	after defining `alias.last = cat-file commit HEAD`, the invocation
	`git last` is equivalent to `git cat-file commit HEAD`. To avoid
	confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that
	hide existing Git commands are ignored. Arguments are split by
	spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping are supported.
	A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.
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Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a
command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the
invocation of `git`. In particular, this is useful when used with `-c`
to pass in one-time configurations or `-p` to force pagination. For example,
`loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase` can be defined such that
running `git loud-rebase` would be equivalent to
`git -c commit.verbose=true rebase`. Also, `ps = -p status` would be a
helpful alias since `git ps` would paginate the output of `git status`
where the original command does not.
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If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point,
it will be treated as a shell command.  For example, defining
`alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD`, the invocation
`git new` is equivalent to running the shell command
`gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD`.  Note:
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* Shell commands will be executed from the top-level directory of a
  repository, which may not necessarily be the current directory.
* `GIT_PREFIX` is set as returned by running `git rev-parse --show-prefix`
  from the original current directory. See linkgit:git-rev-parse[1].
* Shell command aliases always receive any extra arguments provided to
  the Git command-line as positional arguments.
** Care should be taken if your shell alias is a "one-liner" script
   with multiple commands (e.g. in a pipeline), references multiple
   arguments, or is otherwise not able to handle positional arguments
   added at the end.  For example: `alias.cmd = "!echo $1 | grep $2"`
   called as `git cmd 1 2` will be executed as 'echo $1 | grep $2
   1 2', which is not what you want.
** A convenient way to deal with this is to write your script
   operations in an inline function that is then called with any
   arguments from the command-line.  For example `alias.cmd = "!c() {
   echo $1 | grep $2 ; }; c" will correctly execute the prior example.
** Setting `GIT_TRACE=1` can help you debug the command being run for
   your alias.