Wednesday 25 June 2014

How to fix GIT error: object file is empty (from Stack Overflow)

Source (and all credits):
Stack Overflow: how to fix git error object file is empty

This saved me from a lot of googling and trial/error, I was getting the following error:

error: object file .git/objects/31/65329bb680e30595f242b7c4d8406ca63eeab0 is empty
fatal: loose object 3165329bb680e30595f242b7c4d8406ca63eeab0 (stored in .git/objects/31/65329bb680e30595f242b7c4d8406ca63eeab0) is corrupt


Maybe caused by powering off my VM sandbox while syncing or some other weirdness, normally with a very low impact as you can always do a git clone, but as I had some changes done locally on my working branch that I didn't want to miss/re-do, this saved my day. The original answer with full comments can be found at the link above, the brief version is:

cp -a .git .git-old
git fsck --full
# Remove empty files by using "rm", continue until none is left and the "missing blob" starts showing
git reflog
# It will show "fatal: bad object HEAD"
tail -n 2 .git/logs/refs/heads/master
# Identify parent of last commit (the one HEAD is pointing to), easily recognizable as it will show up twice
git show commit_parent
git update-ref HEAD commit_parent
git fsck --full
# There are some blobs left from outdated index, nuke and carry on
rm .git/index
git reset
# There should be only references to "dangling blobs", these are not errors, continue
git status
git add .
git commit -m "Recovering from lost objects"
And done.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You saved my day!!
Respect!

Okobolo said...

Great post!

Unknown said...

Really thanks for your manual.