I've been having some strange errors lately. I have a working install of Git, but this is my shell output when committing changes:
$ git commit -m 'Removing crap'
error: unable to append to .git/logs/refs/heads/master
fatal: cannot update HEAD ref
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What does `git fsck` show you? – Greg Hewgill Apr 07 '12 at 20:38
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dangling commit 89e268b736b233ac1c7778b20f0541932c387096 dangling commit ee24220d0b6fbc31a9e07a58993b8f2360afa216 dangling commit ff24fe8f928b7c5dc41376c8fc5ec8cdcf7cbd20 dangling commit af36717779105b7994e544766d4a6e85ebbf8e27 dangling commit f737506211dd995e50df0a10d189beca44a7c385 – rowantran Apr 07 '12 at 20:41
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So, no major errors then? That means it's *probably not* a repository integrity problem. – Greg Hewgill Apr 07 '12 at 20:42
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So, do you have any idea what's causing it? – rowantran Apr 07 '12 at 21:03
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I'm afraid not, sorry. You might try using `strace` to see if you can identify the failing system call. – Greg Hewgill Apr 07 '12 at 23:46
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When I ran VS Code with Administrator rights it worked. – Kishan Vaishnav Jan 06 '21 at 06:43
3 Answers
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Check the user and permission on .git/logs/refs/heads/master
This should might fix it it, at least on a unix machine:
sudo chown -Rc $UID .git/
Billjk
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I'm pretty sure I have read+write permissions. I opened it in pico, and I was able to write text to it. – rowantran Apr 07 '12 at 20:54
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The ownership can get messed up if you made changes as another user, e.g. root and then tried to push/pull etc. The sudo chown -Rc $UID .git/ fixed it for me too. Make sure that if you have nested .git folders, you make this change in the appropriate repo of your project.
John Ko
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