Git rebase got 'unlink of file failed' error

Question

Using msysgit 1.7.0.2 , when doing git rebase -i , it hangs and there's no message.
After enter ctrl+c , I can see

'unlink of file failed, should I try again (y/n)?'

Then I tried git rebase --abort but got same error message. So now it's stuck in the middle of rebase process. This error seems to be caused by read-only file.

Is there any way to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

Did you try with set GIT_ASK_YESNO=false ?

This Google group thread mentions it in the recent mingw evolutions:

Make use of the new environment variable GIT_ASK_YESNO to support the recently implemented fallback in case unlink , rename or rmdir fail for files in use on Windows.

What exact version of Git for windows are you using?
Note: msysgit setup is not the same than the "Git for Windows" setup , see also " Different between msysgit and cygwin + git ? ")

---

git 2.8.4 (June 2016) does mention issue 755 which should also alleviate the issue ( commit 2db0641 ):

Make sure temporary file handles are not inherited by child processes

---

See also Git 2.19 (Q3 2018): " Git - Unlink of file .idx and .pack failed (The only process owned handle to this file is git.exe) ".

Answer 2

I don't know if it applies in your situation, but I've just had a similar situation with 1.7.10.msysgit.1 (talking to a network share on an Ubuntu server). In my case, a failed merge had made several objects owned by root with permissions -r--rwSr--. A simple SSH login and

sudo chown steve: .git/*

fixed one problem (for my user - unless you're called steve, you'll need to change that to your username!), and

chmod -R 0755 .git/*

fixed the other.

Answer 3

There might be an instance of the file that causes the error to pop-up in git, try closing all other instances of the file and then pressing "y" in git.

Hope it solves the issue!