pre-commit currently passes selected filenames to hooks via argv.
For large changesets (or --all-files), argv length limits are hit and
filenames are partitioned, causing multiple hook invocations.
This means there is currently no built-in way to pass filenames to an
underlying hook in one shot without chunking / re-running. The only practical
workaround is to set pass_filenames: false and run custom git operations in
hook code to reconstruct the file set, which is expensive and duplicates
pre-commit's own file-selection logic.
This change adds a hook option:
pass_filenames_via_stdin: true
When enabled, pre-commit sends filenames as NUL-delimited bytes on stdin and
runs the hook in a single invocation (no argv chunking).
Why NUL-delimited stdin:
- safe for filenames containing spaces/newlines
- matches established -0 conventions in unix tooling
Usage for hook authors:
- shell:
while IFS= read -r -d '' filename; do
...
done
- python:
data = sys.stdin.buffer.read()
filenames = [os.fsdecode(p) for p in data.split(b'\0') if p]
Behavior notes:
- default remains argv-based passing
- pass_filenames: false still disables filename passing entirely
Implementation includes schema/runtime wiring, shared NUL encode/decode
helpers, and tests covering defaulting and runtime behavior.
When git status runs in a repo with submodules, it'll recursively run
git status in every submodule as well by default (sequentially).
git status is substantially slower on Windows than on Linux. git diff
behaves similarly to git status in terms of running recursively within
all submodules. In repos with hundreds of submodules, this quickly adds
up when git status/diff are called multiple times. Pre-commit runs
git status once at the beginning of an operation and then runs git diff
before and after each hook. These calls quickly add up and make
pre-commit unusable in large repos with lots of submodules.
This commit drastically improves performance in repos with lots of
submodules and fixes#1701 by telling git status and git diff to ignore
submodules. This change is not expected to have any negative effect on
existing hooks because each submodule should manage its own hooks
instead of relying on superproject hooks to manipulate their contents.
If using the prepare-commit-msg and commit-msg stages specifically (such
as with the try-repo command), the `--commit-msg-filename` arg must be
provided.
[fixes#1336]
chore: improve error message for hook stage check
