1GIT-FSCK(1) Git Manual GIT-FSCK(1)
2
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 the 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 are
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 trigger 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.fsck.*. 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 must be set to the same values.
126 When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and
128 vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the
129 <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn
130 or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with
131 the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line -
132 missing email" means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will
133 hide that issue.
134 In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with
136 problems with fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of
137 breakages these problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing
138 the latter will allow new instances of the same breakages go
139 unnoticed.
140 Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but
142 doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id>
143 will only cause git to warn.
144 See the Fsck Messages section of git-fsck(1) for supported values
146 of <msg-id>.
147 fsck.skipList
149 The path to a list of object names (i.e. one unabbreviated SHA-1
150 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should
151 be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later, comments (#), empty
152 lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace are ignored.
153 Everything but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions.
154 This feature is useful when an established project should be
156 accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely
157 ignored, such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt
158 objects cannot be skipped with this setting.
159 Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding
161 receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants.
162 Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the
164 receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not
165 fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren’t set. To
166 uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different
167 circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.
168 Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object
170 names list should be sorted. This was never a requirement; the
171 object names could appear in any order, but when reading the list
172 we tracked whether the list was sorted for the purposes of an
173 internal binary search implementation, which could save itself some
174 work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list
175 there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list.
176 After Git version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so
177 there’s now no reason to pre-sort the list.
178
180 git-fsck tests SHA-1 and general object sanity, and it does full
181 tracking of the resulting reachability and everything else. It prints
182 out any corruption it finds (missing or bad objects), and if you use
183 the --unreachable flag it will also print out objects that exist but
184 that aren’t reachable from any of the specified head nodes (or the
185 default set, as mentioned above).
186 Any corrupt objects you will have to find in backups or other archives
188 (i.e., you can just remove them and do an rsync with some other site in
189 the hopes that somebody else has the object you have corrupted).
190 If core.commitGraph is true, the commit-graph file will also be
192 inspected using git commit-graph verify. See git-commit-graph(1).
193
195 unreachable <type> <object>
196 The <type> object <object>, isn’t actually referred to directly or
197 indirectly in any of the trees or commits seen. This can mean that
198 there’s another root node that you’re not specifying or that the
199 tree is corrupt. If you haven’t missed a root node then you might
200 as well delete unreachable nodes since they can’t be used.
201 missing <type> <object>
203 The <type> object <object>, is referred to but isn’t present in the
204 database.
205 dangling <type> <object>
207 The <type> object <object>, is present in the database but never
208 directly used. A dangling commit could be a root node.
209 hash mismatch <object>
211 The database has an object whose hash doesn’t match the object
212 database value. This indicates a serious data integrity problem.
213
215 The following lists the types of errors git fsck detects and what each
216 error means, with their default severity. The severity of the error,
217 other than those that are marked as "(FATAL)", can be tweaked by
218 setting the corresponding fsck.<msg-id> configuration variable.
219 badDate
221 (ERROR) Invalid date format in an author/committer line.
222 badDateOverflow
224 (ERROR) Invalid date value in an author/committer line.
225 badEmail
227 (ERROR) Invalid email format in an author/committer line.
228 badFilemode
230 (INFO) A tree contains a bad filemode entry.
231 badName
233 (ERROR) An author/committer name is empty.
234 badObjectSha1
236 (ERROR) An object has a bad sha1.
237 badParentSha1
239 (ERROR) A commit object has a bad parent sha1.
240 badTagName
242 (INFO) A tag has an invalid format.
243 badTimezone
245 (ERROR) Found an invalid time zone in an author/committer line.
246 badTree
248 (ERROR) A tree cannot be parsed.
249 badTreeSha1
251 (ERROR) A tree has an invalid format.
252 badType
254 (ERROR) Found an invalid object type.
255 duplicateEntries
257 (ERROR) A tree contains duplicate file entries.
258 emptyName
260 (WARN) A path contains an empty name.
261 extraHeaderEntry
263 (IGNORE) Extra headers found after tagger.
264 fullPathname
266 (WARN) A path contains the full path starting with "/".
267 gitattributesBlob
269 (ERROR) A non-blob found at .gitattributes.
270 gitattributesLarge
272 (ERROR) The .gitattributes blob is too large.
273 gitattributesLineLength
275 (ERROR) The .gitattributes blob contains too long lines.
276 gitattributesMissing
278 (ERROR) Unable to read .gitattributes blob.
279 gitattributesSymlink
281 (INFO) .gitattributes is a symlink.
282 gitignoreSymlink
284 (INFO) .gitignore is a symlink.
285 gitmodulesBlob
287 (ERROR) A non-blob found at .gitmodules.
288 gitmodulesLarge
290 (ERROR) The .gitmodules file is too large to parse.
291 gitmodulesMissing
293 (ERROR) Unable to read .gitmodules blob.
294 gitmodulesName
296 (ERROR) A submodule name is invalid.
297 gitmodulesParse
299 (INFO) Could not parse .gitmodules blob.
300 gitmodulesLarge; (ERROR) .gitmodules blob is too large to parse.
302 gitmodulesPath
304 (ERROR) .gitmodules path is invalid.
305 gitmodulesSymlink
307 (ERROR) .gitmodules is a symlink.
308 gitmodulesUpdate
310 (ERROR) Found an invalid submodule update setting.
311 gitmodulesUrl
313 (ERROR) Found an invalid submodule url.
314 hasDot
316 (WARN) A tree contains an entry named ..
317 hasDotdot
319 (WARN) A tree contains an entry named ...
320 hasDotgit
322 (WARN) A tree contains an entry named .git.
323 largePathname
325 (WARN) A tree contains an entry with a very long path name. If the
326 value of fsck.largePathname contains a colon, that value is used as
327 the maximum allowable length (e.g., "warn:10" would complain about
328 any path component of 11 or more bytes). The default value is 4096.
329 mailmapSymlink
331 (INFO) .mailmap is a symlink.
332 missingAuthor
334 (ERROR) Author is missing.
335 missingCommitter
337 (ERROR) Committer is missing.
338 missingEmail
340 (ERROR) Email is missing in an author/committer line.
341 missingNameBeforeEmail
343 (ERROR) Missing name before an email in an author/committer line.
344 missingObject
346 (ERROR) Missing object line in tag object.
347 missingSpaceBeforeDate
349 (ERROR) Missing space before date in an author/committer line.
350 missingSpaceBeforeEmail
352 (ERROR) Missing space before the email in an author/committer line.
353 missingTag
355 (ERROR) Unexpected end after type line in a tag object.
356 missingTagEntry
358 (ERROR) Missing tag line in a tag object.
359 missingTaggerEntry
361 (INFO) Missing tagger line in a tag object.
362 missingTree
364 (ERROR) Missing tree line in a commit object.
365 missingType
367 (ERROR) Invalid type value on the type line in a tag object.
368 missingTypeEntry
370 (ERROR) Missing type line in a tag object.
371 multipleAuthors
373 (ERROR) Multiple author lines found in a commit.
374 nulInCommit
376 (WARN) Found a NUL byte in the commit object body.
377 nulInHeader
379 (FATAL) NUL byte exists in the object header.
380 nullSha1
382 (WARN) Tree contains entries pointing to a null sha1.
383 treeNotSorted
385 (ERROR) A tree is not properly sorted.
386 unknownType
388 (ERROR) Found an unknown object type.
389 unterminatedHeader
391 (FATAL) Missing end-of-line in the object header.
392 zeroPaddedDate
394 (ERROR) Found a zero padded date in an author/committer line.
395 zeroPaddedFilemode
397 (WARN) Found a zero padded filemode in a tree.
398
400 GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
401 used to specify the object database root (usually $GIT_DIR/objects)
402 GIT_INDEX_FILE
404 used to specify the index file of the index
405 GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES
407 used to specify additional object database roots (usually unset)
408
410 Part of the git(1) suite
411Git 2.43.0 11/20/2023 GIT-FSCK(1)