Re: Meaning of "fatal: protocol error: bad line length character"?

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 20, 2007, 20:42 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7ivh77md.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vbqkt78n7.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com> writes:
>
>> We are using git 1.4.4.1, the latest I thought available, not 1.4.4.4
>> (perhaps you mis-typed?).
>>
>> In any case, I personally would love to try the latest build of git,
>> but I don't think I can convince the rest of the company to do so.
>>
>> I just got an email from one of the developers.  He seems to think
>> this is alleviated by using bash instead of tcsh.
>
> Heh, you'll never know what you would get until you ask.  I
> temporarily run chsh on myself to use tcsh as my login shell,
> and sure enough I am getting the error.
>
> fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: 75 70 64 61
>
> It reads "u p d a"; most likely the command name we are running,
> which is "update".  I think it is spitting out an error message
> or something silly like that saying "update hook is not
> executable".  Let me dig a bit further and report later.

That was output to stdout made from the update hook in my case. I do not know your setup, but if you make sure your update hook does not spit out anything to its stdout (diag can go to stderr), you should be able to work it around.

Funny thing is, at least in recent enough git, I think we set up redirection to force output from hook scripts to stderr, but I do not remember when it happened. Let's see...

	...goes and looks...

That was supposed to have been fixed with commit cd83c74c (Dec 30, 2006), but this indicates the fix is not working at all when your login shell is tcsh.

Hmmmmmm.....