gitk: "argument list too long"

Chris Cowan· Jun 15, 2015, 18:25 UTC · lore

I've recently had an issue where running "gitk --all" has stopped working on a large repository of mine. Gitk's main window appears with all of the sections empty, and a modal tells me 'Error executing git log: couldn't execute "git": argument list too long'.

I'm on OS X, and am running git version 2.4.3 installed via homebrew. "getconf ARG_MAX" tells me that the maximum argument length is 262144 bytes. "git tag|wc -l" tells me that there 5271 tags in the repo, and more are added regularly. I think that's what set it over recently. For now I've worked around the issue by running "gitk --branches" instead.

I searched for other mentions of this issue, and found this issue from I think this same mailing list: http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg243731.html . Trying to run "gitk --all" in the chromium git repo (available at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git) gives me the same issue too always as Nicolas reported.

Dean Pulsifer· Sep 12, 2015, 20:04 UTC · re: Chris Cowan · lore

Re: gitk:

Chris Cowan <cowan <at> streak.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> I've recently had an issue where running "gitk --all" has stopped
> working on a large repository of mine. Gitk's main window appears with
> all of the sections empty, and a modal tells me 'Error executing git
> log: couldn't execute "git": argument list too long'.
> 
> I'm on OS X, and am running git version 2.4.3 installed via homebrew.

I am also seeing this just as of this week.  Did you find a solution?