Re: FETCH_HEAD files and mirrored repos

Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> writes:

The only time Git itself uses FETCH_HEAD is during "git pull".

"git pull" is a two step process---it first calls "git fetch" and then calls "git merge" (or "git rebase") to integrate the fetched history with the history of your current branch. "git fetch" leaves what it got in that file, and "git pull" figures out what parameters and message to use to drive the second step. After that, FETCH_HEAD is not used by Git. If you call "git fetch" yourself, FETCH_HEAD left by that process is not used by Git itself, but you can use what is in it to manually execute the second step of what "git pull" would do.

So, unless your script depends on the presence and/or the contents of FETCH_HEAD, you can safely remove it.