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I can't pull new changes from my repository on GitLab because I'm getting the error below:

Cloning into 'X'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 450, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (331/331), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (215/215), done.
remote: Total 450 (delta 145), reused 280 (delta 108), pack-reused 119 eceiving objects: 100% (450/450), 20.83 MiB | 20.82 MiB/s
Receiving objects: 100% (450/450), 26.61 MiB | 20.89 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (158/158), done.
error: invalid path '\'
fatal: unable to checkout working tree

According to this question, I have tried git config core.protectNTFS false but nothing changed. Then I tried git config --system core.longpaths true to get more information about the error and found something that I think is the problem but I don't know how to fix it and why that happened: On branch main Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        deleted:    .gitignore
        deleted:    README.md
        deleted:    "\\" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< this
Vala Khosravi
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1 Answers1

5

As far as Git is concerned, there are no folders: files just have file names that may have embedded "/" characters in them. There are only a few limitations to such file names:

  • they cannot start with /;
  • they cannot have more than one adjacent /;
  • they cannot end with /; and
  • they cannot contain an ASCII NUL character (byte-code 0x00).

That leaves a lot of file names, such as D: or aux, that are invalid on Windows, but valid on Linux machines. The file name \ is one such file name.

Your repository has, for some reason, a commit in which there is one file named \. A Linux user can check out this commit and work with this file, but a Windows user like yourself cannot. So when your Git software goes to extract this particular commit, the step at which it is to extract the file \ fails.

You can—and probably should—simply delete this file, but you should also find out who created it and why, and stop them from doing it again. Note that you will still have the commit in which this file exists; you will never be able to check out that particular commit correctly on a Windows machine, but you can do it on a Linux box (e.g., a Linux VM running on your Windows system, in VirtualBox or similar). That means the easiest way to fix it is to set up a Linux system, clone the repository, check out that branch and its commit with the \ file, remove the file, add, commit, and push.

(There are other ways to do it that don't involve setting up a Linux system, but you should use the Linux-system method since having one handy will let you fix many other more difficult issues.)

torek
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