on the title of “git commit murder”

First, the good news. git commit murder is my best-selling fiction title. And the initial reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.

Thank you all. Really.

Computer nerds, being the sort of people they are, have this burning desire for correctness. And I’ve gotten more than one comment that the title should have been:

git commit -am "murder"

Here’s why I didn’t do that.

First, “git commit murder” is a perfectly valid command to commit the file or directory “murder.” Also, bookstore databases can’t reliably cope with non-alphanumerics in titles. A dash and quotes? They’d go nuts.

Titles also need to be short and kind of punchy. A literal command line is neither. That rules out the more complicated command line.

If I had my druthers, I would have included the leading command prompt.

$ git commit murder

This would have left me the ability to give a hypothetical sequel my preferred title.

# git commit murder

Running Git as root is, of course, grounds for violence.

But I have to live with the fact that bookstore databases can’t handle random characters. I’ll have to give said hypothetical sequel a more sensible title, like "git push murder'; DROP TABLE BOOKS".