git bisect issue

malc@pulsesoft.com· Apr 4, 2009, 09:11 UTC · lore

Hello,

I was trying to run git bisect today and stumbled upon this:

$ git bisect start error: pathspec 'bisect' did not match any file(s) known to git.

.git had some (stale?) BISECT_XXX files in it, and removing them helped. One of those (BISECT_START) consisted of a single line: "bisect". If i remember correctly i used to have a bisect branch in this particular repo.

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Christian Couder· Apr 4, 2009, 19:48 UTC · re: malc@pulsesoft.com · lore

Re: git bisect issue

Hi,

Le samedi 4 avril 2009, malc@pulsesoft.com a écrit :

Show 11 quoted lines

> Hello,
>
> I was trying to run git bisect today and stumbled upon this:
>
> $ git bisect start
> error: pathspec 'bisect' did not match any file(s) known to git.
>
> .git had some (stale?) BISECT_XXX files in it, and removing them
> helped. One of those (BISECT_START) consisted of a single line:
> "bisect". If i remember correctly i used to have a bisect branch
> in this particular repo.

When you start bisecting, the current branch is saved in .git/BISECT_START so if you started a bisection in a branch named "bisect", then "bisect" was saved in ".git/BISECT_START". Then you probably didn't use "git bisect reset" to stop bisecting, so the .git/BISECT_START file was not removed.

You probably deleted the "bisect" branch and later when you started a new bisection, "git bisect" found the .git/BISECT_START file, so it thought that you were currently bisecting.

It then tryed to abort the previous bisection by going back to branch saved in the .git/BISECT_START file, and that failed with the error message you saw.

The error message could perhaps be improved with this patch:

diff --git a/git-bisect.sh b/git-bisect.sh
index e313bde..093736c 100755
--- a/git-bisect.sh
+++ b/git-bisect.sh
@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@ bisect_start() {
        then
                # Reset to the rev from where we started.
                start_head=$(cat "$GIT_DIR/BISECT_START")
-               git checkout "$start_head" || exit
+               git checkout "$start_head" -- || exit
        else
                # Get rev from where we start.
                case "$head" in

it will give the following error message instead of the one you saw:

fatal: invalid reference: bisect

Regards,
Christian.