CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Natasha
Natasha

Reputation: 1521

fatal: cannot lock ref 'HEAD': Unable to create 'G:/folder/.git/HEAD.lock': File exists

I accidentally stopped an ongoing git commit and later when I try to

git commit -m"xyz"

I get the following message

fatal: cannot lock ref 'HEAD': Unable to create 'G:/folder/.git/HEAD.lock': File exists.

Another git process seems to be running in this repository, e.g.
an editor opened by 'git commit'. Please make sure all processes
are terminated then try again. If it still fails, a git process
may have crashed in this repository earlier:
remove the file manually to continue.

I tried following the suggestions given here Git cannot lock ref 'HEAD': unable to resolve reference HEAD and tried

 rm -rf .git/refs/heads/

Unfortunately, this didn't help and I still get the same error message posted above when I try git commit.

I also tried git reset and this also gives the same message displayed above.

Alternate suggestions on how to resolve this issue will be really helpful.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2827

Answers (2)

Antrish Mishra
Antrish Mishra

Reputation: 1

Simply navigate to your local repository in the cloned directory and look for .git folder, indise .git you will see the lock file. JUST DELETE it. and you are done.

Upvotes: 0

LeGEC
LeGEC

Reputation: 51780

[this is an answer to "How do I revert rm -rf .git/refs/heads"]

You can restore your branches by reading the branch names and last active commit straight from the log files :

find .git/logs/refs/heads -type f | while read log; do
  ref=$(echo $log | sed -e 's,logs/,,')
  mkdir -p $(dirname $ref)
  echo $(tail -1 $log | cut -d' ' -f2) > $ref
done

Run the above on a linux-ey system with bash, or in git-bash on Windows.

Step by step :

  • git stores the evolution of each branch / reference in a file, under .git/logs. The first command lists those files for branches (refs starting with refs/heads) :
$ find .git/logs/refs/heads -type f
.git/logs/refs/heads/master
.git/logs/refs/heads/foobar
.git/logs/refs/heads/baz/2
.git/logs/refs/heads/baz/1

You can look at the content of any of these files :

$ cat .git/logs/refs/heads/baz/2
0000000... 219145b... Legec <[email protected]> 1603086835 +0200   branch: Created from master
219145b... 425bc45... Legec <[email protected]> 1603086837 +0200   commit: d.txt
425bc45... 84324a8... Legec <[email protected]> 1603087374 +0200   commit: e.txt
84324a8... 5c2e4de... Legec <[email protected]> 1603087380 +0200   rebase (finish): refs/heads/baz/2 onto cbe105c...

each line stores "that ref moved from xxx to yyy", with a message describing what triggered this evolution (commit, rebase, reset ...)

This is the file from which git reflog that/branch reads its info.

  • to get the path to the actual ref, you just need to ditch the logs/ part from this path :

    ref=$(echo $log | sed -e 's,logs/,,')

  • suppose your branch is named thats/my/branch/name, you need to recreate a directory at .git/refs/heads/thats/my/branch/ before creating file name in it :

    mkdir -p $(dirname $ref)

  • finally : from the last line of the log file (tail -1 $log) extract the second field (cut -d ' ' -f2) and store that in the approriate ref file :

    echo $(tail -1 $log | cut -d' ' -f2) > $ref

Upvotes: 2

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