git grep failure?

I use git grep constantly. Today it failed for me. It isn't looking at all the files for some reason. Am I somehow missing something?

midsizeschools@ut:~/tams (master u= origin/master)$ git ls-files | wc
    254     254   10062
midsizeschools@ut:~/tams (master u= origin/master)$ git grep -l . | wc
    250     250    9938
midsizeschools@ut:~/tams (master % u= origin/master)$ git grep -l . |
sort > b
midsizeschools@ut:~/tams (master % u= origin/master)$ git ls-files |
sort > a
midsizeschools@ut:~/tams (master % u= origin/master)$ diff a b
26,27d25
< app/models/tars_attendee.rb
< app/models/tars_district_registration.rb
144d141
< nbproject/private/config.properties
156d152
< public/favicon.ico

# git knows about the file: ~/tams (master u= origin/master)$ git ls-files | grep app/models/tars_district_registration.rb app/models/tars_district_registration.rb

# the string is found by grep in the file: ~/tams (master u= origin/master)$ grep accepts_nested_attributes_for app/models/tars_district_registration.rb accepts_nested_attributes_for :tars_attendees, :allow_destroy => false, :reject_if => proc { |attrs| attrs.all? { |k, v| v.blank? } }

# but git grep doesn't find the file???? ~/tams (master u= origin/master)$ git grep accepts_nested_attributes_for ~/tams (master u= origin/master)$

# git version is reasonably new - not my server, can't upgrade it ~/tams (master u= origin/master)$ git --version git version 2.19.2

-- Wayne Walker lwaynewalker@gmail.com