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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

Why did you write your rearrange with the ! form? The whole point of the leading ! is to say "don't prefix my alias with `git`", but then you go ahead and prefix your alias with `git`. You should be able to write that as

  rearrange = "rebase -i $(git merge-base HEAD @{u})"

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Ha! You're right, that's silly, thanks! I didn't even notice. I don't remember why, it's been a long time, but I think I had a tricky pipe command to figure out the upstream branch-point a long time ago before I learned about merge-base and @{u}.

I was under the impression that you needed to use !-form if you wanted git to use the shell itself, and that not using it basically just does an exec on the subcommand? Is that inaccurate?

Hmm, maybe you're right. I don't know anymore. I thought it just prefixed aliases with "git " and otherwise ran them as normal, but I admit I haven't researched this topic in a long time.

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