Sourcetree and git bash go out of sync?

Question

My understanding is that Sourcetree and Git Bash are just UI (view) looking at the same model (git repo status). So they should show the same state (after I refresh, that is).

But I just did a rebase -i through SourceTree, and perhaps some wrong operations, now I have the two UI reporting different states:

1. Sourcetree (and Eclise Egit, too) thought my repo is clean and I could even checkout different branches at will

2. Git Bash thought I am still in the middle of an interactive rebase and show the state as (where foo is a certain branch)

   (foo|REBASE-i 1/1)

When I did rebase --continue in Git Bash, I got these errors:

$ git rebase --continue
error: update_ref failed for ref 'refs/heads/foo': cannot lock ref 'refs/heads/foo': is at 70b13393524028fbeb15b853b3d058f6802f961b but expected 827b12fb1ddb5599e744d0bc07ec831d1ef0c843
error: could not update refs/heads/foo

How can this be possible?

How can I bail out?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I am providing my own answer here.

For the same error (but maybe different causes), there is a popular way to solve the problem by running

git gc --prunce=now

See this SO answer

But this did not solve my problem.

Finally, I power-cycled my machine and then ran

git rebase --abort

And then the problem went away. I think what happened was that there were some dead process hold on to some file-system object and that prevented the git rebase --abort from working correctly before the power cycle.

However, at the end I still do not understand why Sourcetree (and Eclipse/Egit and Git GUI) would report a different state from Git bash (apparently it was the latter who was reporting a wrong state).