.bashrc is causing git push to fail

Question

I'm trying to push code using git to my remote server, but I get the error:

fatal: protocol error: bad line length character:
  8

I researched this bug and it turns out my .bashrc file that echos out a welcome screen is causing this error. What I would like to do is determine if this is a git push and to NOT display the welcome screen, or only display the screen when logging into SSH with no directory parameter:

ssh user@ssh-server.foo:/deployment/bare-git-repo

Here is the relevant lines in .bashrc:

if [ -e ./.doc ]
then
    cat ./.doc
    pm2 list
fi

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I don’t think there’s anything specific to git push hooks on the server, that you could use, but you could check whether you’re outputting to a terminal:

if [ -t 1 ] && [ -e ./.doc ]; then
    cat ./.doc
    pm2 list
fi

This will deal with a number of other cases where outputting the contents ./.doc doesn’t serve much purpose and could cause problems.

Answer 2

I suspect what you really want to do, is prevent running things which have no business being run in a non-interactive shell from running.

A common tactic for this, is to check whether stdin is not attached to a terminal via [[ ! -t 1 ]], or to check whether the bash process is not marked as interactive via [[ $- != *i* ]]. If one of these failure cases evaluates to true, then nothing else in your bashrc should get executed at all, and you should just return early.