Git commit -m does not accept spaces in the message [closed]

Question

I am relatively new to Linux so this is probably an easy one but when I use quotes (single or double) around my git commit messages the words are taken as filenames. How do I use -m with spaces in the message - I do not want to use vi.

user@linux:~/Documents/tmp$ git status

On branch master

Initial commit

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

    new file:   afile

user@linux:~/Documents/tmp$ git commit -m ¨this message has spaces and fails¨ 

error: pathspec 'message' did not match any file(s) known to git.

error: pathspec 'has' did not match any file(s) known to git.

error: pathspec 'spaces' did not match any file(s) known to git.

error: pathspec 'and' did not match any file(s) known to git.

error: pathspec 'fails¨' did not match any file(s) known to git.

user@linux:~/Documents/tmp$ git commit -m ¨nospacesisokay¨

[master (root-commit) 37afcd6] ¨nospacesisokay¨

1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

create mode 100644 afile

Answer 1

Use regular quotes (double quotes ", or quotes '), fellow :) ¨ is too exotic for bash so it splits down your message into tokens by whitespaces and pass these tokens separately to git.

In unix-like systems, unlike MS Windows cmd.exe, (well, MinGW and Cygwin are unix-like too :) ) splitting command line into tokens is peformed by a shell, be it a sh- or csh-compatible shell (bash, zsh, ash, sash, ksh, tcsh and so on and so forth). A program receives a ready to use array of arguments. So if a user wants to pass a line with spaces, escape-sequences and so on, she should quote or escape that line properly.