Project Setup Problem

Hi,

I am very new to git and I am trying to create my first project. After running: "git init", I ran "git add ." but I get the following error message: fatal: pathspec '' did not match any files

I am running on CentOS 4.7 on a CPanel/WHM server. The git install is in a user's account space.

Thanks, Jason

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:22:56AM +0000, Jason Brice wrote:

Probably because you don't have any files, thus there was nothing to match. You can't add or commit in git until there is something to add or commit.

If you do have files and you got that message, then that is a problem (and let us know).

All that being said, the error message is not especially helpful. In particular, showing '' when the user asked for '.' can look like a bug (when in fact it is an artifact of how git translates the pathspecs internally).

The point of that message is to warn the user of typos or other mistakes (see f259339). But pointing to an existing but empty directory probably shouldn't generate a warning. And in fact, neither "mkdir foo && cd foo && git add ." nor "mkdir foo && git add foo" generates a warning. It is really just that the empty pathspec for the root doesn't work (because it fools our lstat() call).

I suspect, but didn't carefully investigate, that this is actually a regression introduced by my ancient e96980e (builtin-add: simplify (and increase accuracy of) exclude handling, 2007-06-12) which reorganized that section of code a bit. I did a quick check, which contains f259339 but not e96980e, and it treats "git add ." in an empty project root as a no-op.

Junio, I think we should apply the patch below. It is a bugfix, but obviously this is not a critical bug (the impact is small, and it has been around for 2 years already), and given that we are so late in the release cycle, it is probably fine to wait for post-1.6.3.

-- >8 --
Subject: [PATCH] add: don't complain when adding empty project root

We try to warn the user if one of their pathspecs caused no matches, as it may have been a typo. However, we disable the warning if the pathspec points to an existing file, since that means it is not a typo but simply an empty directory.

Unfortunately, the file_exists() test was broken for one special case: the pathspec of the project root is just "". This patch detects this special case and acts as if the file exists (which it must, since it is the project root).

The user-visible effect is that this:

  $ mkdir repo && cd repo && git init && git add .

used to complain like:

  fatal: pathspec '' did not match any files

but now is a silent no-op.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
 builtin-add.c |    2 +-
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)