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.
