CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Hao Shen
Hao Shen

Reputation: 2755

gitk gives "argument list too long" error

I always got the "argument list too long" error when I try to use "gitk" to open the GUI of the history for some large repo. Even using "gitk -n" didn't solve the problem. Does anybody here have same issue? Thanks,

couldn't execute "git": argument list too long
couldn't execute "git": argument list too long
    while executing
"open [concat $cmd $ids] r"
    (procedure "getallcommits" line 47)
    invoked from within
"getallcommits"
    (procedure "readcache" line 80)
    invoked from within
"readcache file13"
    ("eval" body line 1)
    invoked from within
"eval $script"
    (procedure "dorunq" line 11)
    invoked from within
"dorunq"
    ("after" script)

Upvotes: 6

Views: 12416

Answers (4)

Étienne Miret
Étienne Miret

Reputation: 6660

I consistently had this error on a repo with a large number of references (50k+ remote branches).

The solution is twofold:

1. Reduce the number of refs to something your system can handle.

Obviously, deleting merged branches is a good practice, as well is keeping the total number of refs to a reasonable value.

In my case I had no control on the remote and therefore couldn’t do so at the source. So I used git’s ability to filter remote refs by setting the remote.<name>.fetch configuration option through the git remote set-branches command:

git remote set-branches $REMOTE $BRANCH0 $BRANCH1 $BRANCH2 # List only the few branches I’m interested in.
for REMOTE_BRANCH in $(git branch -r); do
  git branch -rd "${REMOTE_BRANCH}" # Clear the branches I already know about
done
git fetch $REMOTE # Fetch again the branches I selected on the first line.

2. THEN, delete gitk’s cache(s)

Once the total number of refs existings in .git/refs is low enough, you should clear all gitk’s caches with:

find .git -name gitk.cache -delete

Upvotes: 0

dobriai
dobriai

Reputation: 61

Adding on to the answer above: If you are using worktrees, bear in mind that there are other gitk.cache files too, like so:

.git/worktrees/dev-2/gitk.cache

You may have to delete those too.

Upvotes: 3

Petr
Petr

Reputation: 9997

I've found a workaroung here and it worked for me: just remove .git/gitk.cache file.

Upvotes: 13

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189689

"Argument list too long" is a kernel error when you pass in too many arguments on a command line.

Probably your repo contains something which causes $ids (I'm purely speculating here) to exceed the ARG_MAX limit of your platform.

This is basically a bug in Gitk, but if you can figure out which resource is causing this, you can probably work around the problem by limiting or pruning it somehow.

Upvotes: 2

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