1GIT-FSCK(1) Git Manual GIT-FSCK(1)
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6 git-fsck - Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the
7 database
8
10 git fsck [--tags] [--root] [--unreachable] [--cache] [--no-reflogs]
11 [--[no-]full] [--strict] [--verbose] [--lost-found]
12 [--[no-]dangling] [--[no-]progress] [--connectivity-only]
13 [--[no-]name-objects] [<object>...]
14
16 Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the database.
17
19 <object>
20 An object to treat as the head of an unreachability trace.
21 If no objects are given, git fsck defaults to using the index file,
23 all SHA-1 references in refs namespace, and all reflogs (unless
24 --no-reflogs is given) as heads.
25 --unreachable
27 Print out objects that exist but that aren’t reachable from any of
28 the reference nodes.
29 --[no-]dangling
31 Print objects that exist but that are never directly used
32 (default). --no-dangling can be used to omit this information from
33 the output.
34 --root
36 Report root nodes.
37 --tags
39 Report tags.
40 --cache
42 Consider any object recorded in the index also as a head node for
43 an unreachability trace.
44 --no-reflogs
46 Do not consider commits that are referenced only by an entry in a
47 reflog to be reachable. This option is meant only to search for
48 commits that used to be in a ref, but now aren’t, but are still in
49 that corresponding reflog.
50 --full
52 Check not just objects in GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY ($GIT_DIR/objects),
53 but also the ones found in alternate object pools listed in
54 GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES or
55 $GIT_DIR/objects/info/alternates, and in packed Git archives found
56 in $GIT_DIR/objects/pack and corresponding pack subdirectories in
57 alternate object pools. This is now default; you can turn it off
58 with --no-full.
59 --connectivity-only
61 Check only the connectivity of reachable objects, making sure that
62 any objects referenced by a reachable tag, commit, or tree is
63 present. This speeds up the operation by avoiding reading blobs
64 entirely (though it does still check that referenced blobs exist).
65 This will detect corruption in commits and trees, but not do any
66 semantic checks (e.g., for format errors). Corruption in blob
67 objects will not be detected at all.
68 Unreachable tags, commits, and trees will also be accessed to find
70 the tips of dangling segments of history. Use --no-dangling if you
71 don’t care about this output and want to speed it up further.
72 --strict
74 Enable more strict checking, namely to catch a file mode recorded
75 with g+w bit set, which was created by older versions of Git.
76 Existing repositories, including the Linux kernel, Git itself, and
77 sparse repository have old objects that triggers this check, but it
78 is recommended to check new projects with this flag.
79 --verbose
81 Be chatty.
82 --lost-found
84 Write dangling objects into .git/lost-found/commit/ or
85 .git/lost-found/other/, depending on type. If the object is a blob,
86 the contents are written into the file, rather than its object
87 name.
88 --name-objects
90 When displaying names of reachable objects, in addition to the
91 SHA-1 also display a name that describes how they are reachable,
92 compatible with git-rev-parse(1), e.g.
93 HEAD@{1234567890}~25^2:src/.
94 --[no-]progress
96 Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default
97 when it is attached to a terminal, unless --no-progress or
98 --verbose is specified. --progress forces progress status even if
99 the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
100
102 Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from
103 the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as what’s
104 found there:
105 fsck.<msg-id>
107 During fsck git may find issues with legacy data which wouldn’t be
108 generated by current versions of git, and which wouldn’t be sent
109 over the wire if transfer.fsckObjects was set. This feature is
110 intended to support working with legacy repositories containing
111 such data.
112 Setting fsck.<msg-id> will be picked up by git-fsck(1), but to
114 accept pushes of such data set receive.fsck.<msg-id> instead, or to
115 clone or fetch it set fetch.fsck.<msg-id>.
116 The rest of the documentation discusses fsck.* for brevity, but
118 the same applies for the corresponding receive.fsck.* and
119 fetch.<msg-id>.*. variables.
120 Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the
122 receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> variables will not
123 fall back on the fsck.<msg-id> configuration if they aren’t set. To
124 uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different
125 circumstances all three of them they must all set to the same
126 values.
127 When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and
129 vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the
130 <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn
131 or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with
132 the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line -
133 missing email" means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will
134 hide that issue.
135 In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with
137 problems with fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of
138 breakages these problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing
139 the latter will allow new instances of the same breakages go
140 unnoticed.
141 Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but
143 doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id>
144 will only cause git to warn.
145 See Fsck Messages section of git-fsck(1) for supported values of
147 <msg-id>.
148 fsck.skipList
150 The path to a list of object names (i.e. one unabbreviated SHA-1
151 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should
152 be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later comments (#), empty
153 lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace is ignored.
154 Everything but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions.
155 This feature is useful when an established project should be
157 accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely
158 ignored such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt
159 objects cannot be skipped with this setting.
160 Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding
162 receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants.
163 Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the
165 receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not
166 fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren’t set. To
167 uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different
168 circumstances all three of them they must all set to the same
169 values.
170 Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object
172 names list should be sorted. This was never a requirement, the
173 object names could appear in any order, but when reading the list
174 we tracked whether the list was sorted for the purposes of an
175 internal binary search implementation, which could save itself some
176 work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list
177 there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list.
178 After Git version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so
179 there’s now no reason to pre-sort the list.
180
182 git-fsck tests SHA-1 and general object sanity, and it does full
183 tracking of the resulting reachability and everything else. It prints
184 out any corruption it finds (missing or bad objects), and if you use
185 the --unreachable flag it will also print out objects that exist but
186 that aren’t reachable from any of the specified head nodes (or the
187 default set, as mentioned above).
188 Any corrupt objects you will have to find in backups or other archives
190 (i.e., you can just remove them and do an rsync with some other site in
191 the hopes that somebody else has the object you have corrupted).
192 If core.commitGraph is true, the commit-graph file will also be
194 inspected using git commit-graph verify. See git-commit-graph(1).
195
197 unreachable <type> <object>
198 The <type> object <object>, isn’t actually referred to directly or
199 indirectly in any of the trees or commits seen. This can mean that
200 there’s another root node that you’re not specifying or that the
201 tree is corrupt. If you haven’t missed a root node then you might
202 as well delete unreachable nodes since they can’t be used.
203 missing <type> <object>
205 The <type> object <object>, is referred to but isn’t present in the
206 database.
207 dangling <type> <object>
209 The <type> object <object>, is present in the database but never
210 directly used. A dangling commit could be a root node.
211 hash mismatch <object>
213 The database has an object whose hash doesn’t match the object
214 database value. This indicates a serious data integrity problem.
215
217 The following lists the types of errors git fsck detects and what each
218 error means, with their default severity. The severity of the error,
219 other than those that are marked as "(FATAL)", can be tweaked by
220 setting the corresponding fsck.<msg-id> configuration variable.
221 badDate
223 (ERROR) Invalid date format in an author/committer line.
224 badDateOverflow
226 (ERROR) Invalid date value in an author/committer line.
227 badEmail
229 (ERROR) Invalid email format in an author/committer line.
230 badFilemode
232 (INFO) A tree contains a bad filemode entry.
233 badName
235 (ERROR) An author/committer name is empty.
236 badObjectSha1
238 (ERROR) An object has a bad sha1.
239 badParentSha1
241 (ERROR) A commit object has a bad parent sha1.
242 badTagName
244 (INFO) A tag has an invalid format.
245 badTimezone
247 (ERROR) Found an invalid time zone in an author/committer line.
248 badTree
250 (ERROR) A tree cannot be parsed.
251 badTreeSha1
253 (ERROR) A tree has an invalid format.
254 badType
256 (ERROR) Found an invalid object type.
257 duplicateEntries
259 (ERROR) A tree contains duplicate file entries.
260 emptyName
262 (WARN) A path contains an empty name.
263 extraHeaderEntry
265 (IGNORE) Extra headers found after tagger.
266 fullPathname
268 (WARN) A path contains the full path starting with "/".
269 gitattributesSymlink
271 (INFO) .gitattributes is a symlink.
272 gitignoreSymlink
274 (INFO) .gitignore is a symlink.
275 gitmodulesBlob
277 (ERROR) A non-blob found at .gitmodules.
278 gitmodulesLarge
280 (ERROR) The .gitmodules file is too large to parse.
281 gitmodulesMissing
283 (ERROR) Unable to read .gitmodules blob.
284 gitmodulesName
286 (ERROR) A submodule name is invalid.
287 gitmodulesParse
289 (INFO) Could not parse .gitmodules blob.
290 gitmodulesLarge; (ERROR) .gitmodules blob is too large to parse.
292 gitmodulesPath
294 (ERROR) .gitmodules path is invalid.
295 gitmodulesSymlink
297 (ERROR) .gitmodules is a symlink.
298 gitmodulesUpdate
300 (ERROR) Found an invalid submodule update setting.
301 gitmodulesUrl
303 (ERROR) Found an invalid submodule url.
304 hasDot
306 (WARN) A tree contains an entry named ..
307 hasDotdot
309 (WARN) A tree contains an entry named ...
310 hasDotgit
312 (WARN) A tree contains an entry named .git.
313 mailmapSymlink
315 (INFO) .mailmap is a symlink.
316 missingAuthor
318 (ERROR) Author is missing.
319 missingCommitter
321 (ERROR) Committer is missing.
322 missingEmail
324 (ERROR) Email is missing in an author/committer line.
325 missingNameBeforeEmail
327 (ERROR) Missing name before an email in an author/committer line.
328 missingObject
330 (ERROR) Missing object line in tag object.
331 missingSpaceBeforeDate
333 (ERROR) Missing space before date in an author/committer line.
334 missingSpaceBeforeEmail
336 (ERROR) Missing space before the email in author/committer line.
337 missingTag
339 (ERROR) Unexpected end after type line in a tag object.
340 missingTagEntry
342 (ERROR) Missing tag line in a tag object.
343 missingTaggerEntry
345 (INFO) Missing tagger line in a tag object.
346 missingTree
348 (ERROR) Missing tree line in a commit object.
349 missingType
351 (ERROR) Invalid type value on the type line in a tag object.
352 missingTypeEntry
354 (ERROR) Missing type line in a tag object.
355 multipleAuthors
357 (ERROR) Multiple author lines found in a commit.
358 nulInCommit
360 (WARN) Found a NUL byte in the commit object body.
361 nulInHeader
363 (FATAL) NUL byte exists in the object header.
364 nullSha1
366 (WARN) Tree contains entries pointing to a null sha1.
367 treeNotSorted
369 (ERROR) A tree is not properly sorted.
370 unknownType
372 (ERROR) Found an unknown object type.
373 unterminatedHeader
375 (FATAL) Missing end-of-line in the object header.
376 zeroPaddedDate
378 (ERROR) Found a zero padded date in an author/commiter line.
379 zeroPaddedFilemode
381 (WARN) Found a zero padded filemode in a tree.
382
384 GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
385 used to specify the object database root (usually $GIT_DIR/objects)
386 GIT_INDEX_FILE
388 used to specify the index file of the index
389 GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES
391 used to specify additional object database roots (usually unset)
392
394 Part of the git(1) suite
395Git 2.39.1 2023-01-13 GIT-FSCK(1)