NAME
git-fsck - Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the databaseSYNOPSIS
git fsck [--tags] [--root] [--unreachable] [--cache] [--no-reflogs] [--[no-]full] [--strict] [--verbose] [--lost-found] [--[no-]dangling] [--[no-]progress] [--connectivity-only] [--[no-]name-objects] [<object>...]
DESCRIPTION
Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the database.OPTIONS
<object>An object to treat as the head of an
unreachability trace.
If no objects are given, git fsck defaults to using the index file, all
SHA-1 references in refs namespace, and all reflogs (unless
--no-reflogs is given) as heads.
--unreachable
Print out objects that exist but that
aren’t reachable from any of the reference nodes.
--[no-]dangling
Print objects that exist but that are never
directly used (default). --no-dangling can be used to omit this
information from the output.
--root
Report root nodes.
--tags
Report tags.
--cache
Consider any object recorded in the index also
as a head node for an unreachability trace.
--no-reflogs
Do not consider commits that are referenced
only by an entry in a reflog to be reachable. This option is meant only to
search for commits that used to be in a ref, but now aren’t, but are
still in that corresponding reflog.
--full
Check not just objects in GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
($GIT_DIR/objects), but also the ones found in alternate object pools listed
in GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES or $GIT_DIR/objects/info/alternates, and
in packed Git archives found in $GIT_DIR/objects/pack and corresponding pack
subdirectories in alternate object pools. This is now default; you can turn it
off with --no-full.
--connectivity-only
Check only the connectivity of reachable
objects, making sure that any objects referenced by a reachable tag, commit,
or tree is present. This speeds up the operation by avoiding reading blobs
entirely (though it does still check that referenced blobs exist). This will
detect corruption in commits and trees, but not do any semantic checks (e.g.,
for format errors). Corruption in blob objects will not be detected at all.
Unreachable tags, commits, and trees will also be accessed to find the tips of
dangling segments of history. Use --no-dangling if you don’t
care about this output and want to speed it up further.
--strict
Enable more strict checking, namely to catch a
file mode recorded with g+w bit set, which was created by older versions of
Git. Existing repositories, including the Linux kernel, Git itself, and sparse
repository have old objects that triggers this check, but it is recommended to
check new projects with this flag.
--verbose
Be chatty.
--lost-found
Write dangling objects into
.git/lost-found/commit/ or .git/lost-found/other/, depending on type. If the
object is a blob, the contents are written into the file, rather than its
object name.
--name-objects
When displaying names of reachable objects, in
addition to the SHA-1 also display a name that describes how they are
reachable, compatible with git-rev-parse(1), e.g.
HEAD@{1234567890}~25^2:src/.
--[no-]progress
Progress status is reported on the standard
error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless
--no-progress or --verbose is specified. --progress forces progress status
even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
CONFIGURATION
Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as what’s found there: fsck.<msg-id>During fsck git may find issues with legacy
data which wouldn’t be generated by current versions of git, and which
wouldn’t be sent over the wire if transfer.fsckObjects was set.
This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories
containing such data.
Setting fsck.<msg-id> will be picked up by , but
to accept pushes of such data set receive.fsck.<msg-id> instead,
or to clone or fetch it set fetch.fsck.<msg-id>.
The rest of the documentation discusses fsck.* for brevity, but the same
applies for the corresponding receive.fsck.* and
fetch.<msg-id>.*. variables.
Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the
receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id>
variables will not fall back on the fsck.<msg-id> configuration
if they aren’t set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in
different circumstances all three of them they must all set to the same
values.
When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and
vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the
<msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of
error, warn or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the
error/warning with the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid
author/committer line - missing email" means that setting
fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue.
In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with problems with
fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of breakages these
problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing the latter will allow new
instances of the same breakages go unnoticed.
Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but
doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and
fetch.fsck.<msg-id> will only cause git to warn.
See Fsck Messages section of for supported values of
<msg-id>.
fsck.skipList
The path to a list of object names (i.e. one
unabbreviated SHA-1 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way
and should be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later comments ( #),
empty lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace is ignored. Everything
but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions.
This feature is useful when an established project should be accepted despite
early commits containing errors that can be safely ignored such as invalid
committer email addresses. Note: corrupt objects cannot be skipped with this
setting.
Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding
receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants.
Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the
receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not
fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren’t set.
To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances all
three of them they must all set to the same values.
Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object names list should
be sorted. This was never a requirement, the object names could appear in any
order, but when reading the list we tracked whether the list was sorted for
the purposes of an internal binary search implementation, which could save
itself some work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list
there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list. After Git
version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so there’s now no
reason to pre-sort the list.
DISCUSSION
git-fsck tests SHA-1 and general object sanity, and it does full tracking of the resulting reachability and everything else. It prints out any corruption it finds (missing or bad objects), and if you use the --unreachable flag it will also print out objects that exist but that aren’t reachable from any of the specified head nodes (or the default set, as mentioned above).EXTRACTED DIAGNOSTICS
unreachable <type> <object>The <type> object <object>,
isn’t actually referred to directly or indirectly in any of the trees
or commits seen. This can mean that there’s another root node that
you’re not specifying or that the tree is corrupt. If you
haven’t missed a root node then you might as well delete unreachable
nodes since they can’t be used.
missing <type> <object>
The <type> object <object>, is
referred to but isn’t present in the database.
dangling <type> <object>
The <type> object <object>, is
present in the database but never directly used. A dangling commit
could be a root node.
hash mismatch <object>
The database has an object whose hash
doesn’t match the object database value. This indicates a serious data
integrity problem.
FSCK MESSAGES
The following lists the types of errors git fsck detects and what each error means, with their default severity. The severity of the error, other than those that are marked as "(FATAL)", can be tweaked by setting the corresponding fsck.<msg-id> configuration variable. badDate(ERROR) Invalid date format in an
author/committer line.
badDateOverflow
(ERROR) Invalid date value in an
author/committer line.
badEmail
(ERROR) Invalid email format in an
author/committer line.
badFilemode
(INFO) A tree contains a bad filemode
entry.
badName
(ERROR) An author/committer name is
empty.
badObjectSha1
(ERROR) An object has a bad sha1.
badParentSha1
(ERROR) A commit object has a bad parent
sha1.
badTagName
(INFO) A tag has an invalid format.
badTimezone
(ERROR) Found an invalid time zone in an
author/committer line.
badTree
(ERROR) A tree cannot be parsed.
badTreeSha1
(ERROR) A tree has an invalid format.
badType
(ERROR) Found an invalid object type.
duplicateEntries
(ERROR) A tree contains duplicate file
entries.
emptyName
(WARN) A path contains an empty name.
extraHeaderEntry
(IGNORE) Extra headers found after
tagger.
fullPathname
(WARN) A path contains the full path starting
with "/".
gitattributesBlob
(ERROR) A non-blob found at
.gitattributes.
gitattributesLarge
(ERROR) The .gitattributes blob is too
large.
gitattributesLineLength
(ERROR) The .gitattributes blob
contains too long lines.
gitattributesMissing
(ERROR) Unable to read .gitattributes
blob.
gitattributesSymlink
(INFO) .gitattributes is a
symlink.
gitignoreSymlink
(INFO) .gitignore is a symlink.
gitmodulesBlob
(ERROR) A non-blob found at
.gitmodules.
gitmodulesLarge
(ERROR) The .gitmodules file is too
large to parse.
gitmodulesMissing
(ERROR) Unable to read .gitmodules
blob.
gitmodulesName
(ERROR) A submodule name is invalid.
gitmodulesParse
(INFO) Could not parse .gitmodules
blob.
(ERROR) .gitmodules path is
invalid.
gitmodulesSymlink
(ERROR) .gitmodules is a symlink.
gitmodulesUpdate
(ERROR) Found an invalid submodule update
setting.
gitmodulesUrl
(ERROR) Found an invalid submodule url.
hasDot
(WARN) A tree contains an entry named
..
hasDotdot
(WARN) A tree contains an entry named
...
hasDotgit
(WARN) A tree contains an entry named
.git.
mailmapSymlink
(INFO) .mailmap is a symlink.
missingAuthor
(ERROR) Author is missing.
missingCommitter
(ERROR) Committer is missing.
missingEmail
(ERROR) Email is missing in an
author/committer line.
missingNameBeforeEmail
(ERROR) Missing name before an email in an
author/committer line.
missingObject
(ERROR) Missing object line in tag
object.
missingSpaceBeforeDate
(ERROR) Missing space before date in an
author/committer line.
missingSpaceBeforeEmail
(ERROR) Missing space before the email in
author/committer line.
missingTag
(ERROR) Unexpected end after type line
in a tag object.
missingTagEntry
(ERROR) Missing tag line in a tag
object.
missingTaggerEntry
(INFO) Missing tagger line in a tag
object.
missingTree
(ERROR) Missing tree line in a commit
object.
missingType
(ERROR) Invalid type value on the type
line in a tag object.
missingTypeEntry
(ERROR) Missing type line in a tag
object.
multipleAuthors
(ERROR) Multiple author lines found in a
commit.
nulInCommit
(WARN) Found a NUL byte in the commit object
body.
nulInHeader
(FATAL) NUL byte exists in the object
header.
nullSha1
(WARN) Tree contains entries pointing to a
null sha1.
treeNotSorted
(ERROR) A tree is not properly sorted.
unknownType
(ERROR) Found an unknown object type.
unterminatedHeader
(FATAL) Missing end-of-line in the object
header.
zeroPaddedDate
(ERROR) Found a zero padded date in an
author/commiter line.
zeroPaddedFilemode
(WARN) Found a zero padded filemode in a
tree.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORYused to specify the object database root
(usually $GIT_DIR/objects)
GIT_INDEX_FILE
used to specify the index file of the
index
GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES
used to specify additional object database
roots (usually unset)
GIT
Part of the git(1) suite02/28/2023 | Git 2.39.2 |