Re: git bisect issue
From: Christian Couder <hidden>
Date: 2016-06-15 22:46:33
Subsystem:
the rest · Maintainer:
Linus Torvalds
Hi, Le samedi 4 avril 2009, malc@pulsesoft.com a écrit :
Hello, I was trying to run git bisect today and stumbled upon this: $ git bisect start error: pathspec 'bisect' did not match any file(s) known to git. .git had some (stale?) BISECT_XXX files in it, and removing them helped. One of those (BISECT_START) consisted of a single line: "bisect". If i remember correctly i used to have a bisect branch in this particular repo.
When you start bisecting, the current branch is saved in .git/BISECT_START so if you started a bisection in a branch named "bisect", then "bisect" was saved in ".git/BISECT_START". Then you probably didn't use "git bisect reset" to stop bisecting, so the .git/BISECT_START file was not removed. You probably deleted the "bisect" branch and later when you started a new bisection, "git bisect" found the .git/BISECT_START file, so it thought that you were currently bisecting. It then tryed to abort the previous bisection by going back to branch saved in the .git/BISECT_START file, and that failed with the error message you saw. The error message could perhaps be improved with this patch:
diff --git a/git-bisect.sh b/git-bisect.sh
index e313bde..093736c 100755
--- a/git-bisect.sh
+++ b/git-bisect.sh@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@ bisect_start() { then # Reset to the rev from where we started. start_head=$(cat "$GIT_DIR/BISECT_START") - git checkout "$start_head" || exit + git checkout "$start_head" -- || exit else # Get rev from where we start. case "$head" in
it will give the following error message instead of the one you saw: fatal: invalid reference: bisect Regards, Christian.