GIT: “fatal: unable to write new_index file” while

Question

When I try to commit changes to local repo, I have got following message:
fatal: unable to write new_index file

Answer 1

I have followed every solution here and none of them worked. I have no shortage of disk space, I have disabled Windows Defender, disabled icon overlays and whatnot. I had tons of files to import and maybe this was causing the problem (I had boost libraries among other things).

I simply opened "Git Bash" and issued a number of git add and a git commit and all went well. This has something to do with TortoiseGit but I am not sure what. It seems to choke on a large number of files or large directory depth.

Answer 2

I used Unlocker on .git\index.lock to unlock any handles that are held open by other processes. In my case it was TGitCache.exe.

Answer 3

For me it was a file locking issue.

To solve it I:

1. Copied the index file (located in the hidden ".git" folder)
2. Deleted the original
3. Renamed the copy back to 'index'

Hope this helps!

Answer 4

I had the same problem on macOS, I have solved it by removing repo_folder/.git/index.lock

Answer 5

I was getting the same error while I was merging a git repo that was sshfs mounted. There was no shortage of space anywhere.

In my case the solution was to add an -o workaround=rename option to the sshfs mount command.

Like so: sshfs -o idmap=user -o uid=[lokal uid] -o gid=[lokal gid] -o workaround=rename [host]: [mountpoint]

Answer 6

I was having this issue, but I was able to commit with msysgit. I updated tortoisegit, and also noticed that my msysgit version was not in sync with tortoise git. I'm not sure if the latest version fixed it, or if it was due to having different versions of tortoise and msysgit. Anyway, another thing to check. It all started working after updating them both to TortoiseGit 1.7.10.0 git version 1.7.10.msysgit.1