This is a neat little piece of shell judo. It’s doing capability detection against a Git repository and then falling back gracefully. Conceptually, this is the Unix philosophy in action: attempt the simplest thing, and if reality disagrees, degrade politely. In other words: optimistic, defensive, and mildly smug—in the best possible way.

Safely Inspect Docs Or Contents On A Specified Git Branch.sh

# Try to show the contents of docs/ from the master branch.
# - git show works for files, but may fail for directories.
# - Suppress errors and limit output to 20 lines.
# - If that fails, fall back to listing files under docs/ instead.
# - Always show only the first 20 results to keep output predictable.
git show master:docs/ 2>/dev/null | head -20 \
  || git ls-tree -r master --name-only | grep '^docs/' | head -20