Re: [BUG REPORT] Intermittent errors: Unable to create '/usr/ports/.git/index.lock': File exists.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 9, 2021, 20:19 UTC
Message-ID: <YTpsQtJa2rX691c0@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1fcdeb8f-5869-cfe4-6063-8d4fb5da709c@rawbw.com>

On Thu, Sep 09, 2021 at 12:29:32PM -0700, Yuri wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Once every ~20 times I call 'git commit' it fails like this:
> 
> $ git commit .
> fatal: Unable to create '/usr/ports/.git/index.lock': File exists.
> 
> Another git process seems to be running in this repository, e.g.
> an editor opened by 'git commit'. Please make sure all processes
> are terminated then try again. If it still fails, a git process
> may have crashed in this repository earlier:
> remove the file manually to continue.
> 
> 
> There's no other instance.

In previous cases of this we've seen, there usually _is_ another instance, just not one directly triggered by the user. E.g., some GUI clients will trigger "git status" in the background, which tries to refresh the index.

If you're running any other Git-related tools (or anything via cron), those might be worth investigating. Otherwise you might try using OS tools to see which processes might be opening such a file (on Linux I'd use inotifywait, but I'm not sure what's available on FreeBSD).

If you do find the culprit, one solution is to get it to use the "--no-optional-locks" option. See the discussion of that option and GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS in git(1), as well as the "BACKGROUND REFRESH" section of git-status(1).

-Peff