threads / discuss / 40903

GIT_INDEX_FILE relative paths are relative to the work tree

Subject: GIT_INDEX_FILE relative paths are relative to the work tree

## tl;dr

2 messages between Nov 27, 2015 and Nov 27, 2015.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Jack O'Connor· Nov 27, 2015, 15:17 UTC · lore

When I use a relative path in the GIT_INDEX_FILE environment variable, git interprets that path relative to the the work tree. This can be confusing if my cwd is some subdirectory of my project; in that case an index file is created in the project root rather than in my cwd. It can also be confusing if I'm using --git-dir and --work-tree, in which case the path is interpreted relative to the latter.

Is this behavior intentional? If so, I think it would be worth mentioning in the documentation for GIT_INDEX_FILE. But I can't think of a case where I would ever want an index file to end up inside my work tree.

This also comes up in http://stackoverflow.com/a/7645492/823869. Using absolute paths is a workaround.

Duy Nguyen· Nov 27, 2015, 15:35 UTC · re: Jack O'Connor · lore

Re: GIT_INDEX_FILE relative paths are relative to the work tree

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 4:17 PM, Jack O'Connor <oconnor663@gmail.com> wrote:
Show 11 quoted lines
> When I use a relative path in the GIT_INDEX_FILE environment variable,
> git interprets that path relative to the the work tree. This can be
> confusing if my cwd is some subdirectory of my project; in that case
> an index file is created in the project root rather than in my cwd. It
> can also be confusing if I'm using --git-dir and --work-tree, in which
> case the path is interpreted relative to the latter.
>
> Is this behavior intentional? If so, I think it would be worth
> mentioning in the documentation for GIT_INDEX_FILE. But I can't think
> of a case where I would ever want an index file to end up inside my
> work tree.

It would be more intuitive if $GIT_INDEX_FILE is relative to user's current directory, not some random work tree root. And mentioning it as such is not sufficient, we may be able to access the index file without a work tree. This variable is so old that I'm afraid changing its behavior will break stuff, so probably best to document "relative $GIT_INDEX_FILE is undefined behavior"

> This also comes up in http://stackoverflow.com/a/7645492/823869. Using
> absolute paths is a workaround.
-- 
Duy

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