RE: "git commit" fails due to spurious file in index

From: Robert Irelan <rirelan@epic.com>
Date: Mar 5, 2013, 15:30 UTC
Message-ID: <2D9BD788B02ABA478C57929170AF952B7637B5@EXCH-MBX-3.epic.com>
In-Reply-To: <87y5e2op9p.fsf@pctrast.inf.ethz.ch>

Yes, you're correct, it was a bug in my pre-commit hook. Thanks!

For posterity, the issue is that I had the following line:

    git diff -z --cached --name-only | egrep -z '\.(pl|pm|t)$' | \
            while read -d'' -r f; do ...

In Bash, when `read` is passed the `-d` option with a zero-length string argument, read will split on null characters (`'\0'`). However, I did not put a space between the `-d` option and the argument, so it took the `-` in the next argument `-r` as the delimiter. My commit includes Perl files with `-` characters in the name, which I had not previously committed to this repo, which is why I only ran into the problem now. I fixed it by changing the read command to `read -r -d '' f`, which now has the crucial space between -d and its argument, making the zero-length string a separate argument.

Robert Irelan | Server Systems | Epic | (608) 271-9000

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Rast [mailto:trast@student.ethz.ch] 
Sent: Monday, March 04, 2013 2:59 PM
To: Robert Irelan
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: "git commit" fails due to spurious file in index

Robert Irelan <rirelan@epic.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Now, when I run 'git add admin_script/setup' to add the new directory 
> to the repo and then try to commit, I receive the following message:
>
>     $ git commit
>     mv: cannot stat `admin_scripts/setup/2012/setup': No such file or 
> directory
>
> The error message is correct in that `admin_scripts/setup/2012/setup` 
> does not exist, either as a file or as a directory. However, I'm not 
> attempting to add this path at all. Using grep, I've confirmed that 
> the only place this path appears in any of my files is in `.git/index`.

To me that sounds like the message comes from a commit hook.  Can you check if you have anything in .git/hooks/, especially pre-commit?

There really isn't any other good reason why 'git commit' would call 'mv' (plain mv, not git!).

-- Thomas Rast trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch