Safe to interrupt »git gc --auto«?

Thomas Schwinge· Oct 29, 2014, 15:06 UTC · lore

Hi!

I couldn't find this answered in the documentation: if, instead of exiting right away, a »git gc --auto« actually commences its housekeeping tasks, is it safe to interrupt (C-c, SIGINT) the original git invocation at this point, or might this cause any inconsistencies, data loss, or failure to perform the task Git has originally been invoked for? I generally do find the auto-housekeeping useful, just sometimes it happens at the "wrong" moment, and so I'd like to delay it until next time.

Grüße,
 Thomas

Jonathan Nieder· Oct 29, 2014, 20:50 UTC · re: Thomas Schwinge · lore

Re: Safe to interrupt »git gc --auto«?

Thomas Schwinge wrote:

> I couldn't find this answered in the documentation: if, instead of
> exiting right away, a »git gc --auto« actually commences its housekeeping
> tasks, is it safe to interrupt (C-c, SIGINT) the original git invocation
> at this point, or might this cause any inconsistencies, data loss,

[...]

Heh.

If gc --auto happens in the middle of e.g. a rebase, then it's possible that there were more commits that were supposed to happen later. You'd need to run 'git rebase --continue' after interrupting the gc in that case.

Interruption should never cause data loss, and as much as possible commands should finish their work before running gc --auto. Please let us know if some command is violating that.

Thanks, Jonathan