fatal ambiguous argument origin unknown revision or path not in the working tree

Question

I used git diff origin often in the past   In a different environment it does not work  I have no clue why   user host gt  git diff origin fatal  ambiguous argument  origin   unknown revision or path         not in the working tree  Use  --  to separate paths from revisions  like this   git  lt command gt    lt revision gt      --   lt file gt         Status   user host gt  git status On branch master nothing to commit  working directory clean   Remotes   user host gt  git remote -v origin  https   example com repos djangotools  fetch  origin  https   example com repos djangotools  push    Version   user host gt  git --version git version 2 7 4   With  git version 1 8 1 4  git diff origin works    BTW I see the same err msg if I use  git diff origin master   BTW2  I think the   master  is redundant  The sane default is to compare the local branch with the same branch on the remote site

User · Answer

I ran into the same situation where commands such as git diff origin or git diff origin master produced the error reported in the question, namely Fatal: ambiguous argument...

To resolve the situation, I ran the command

git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/master

to set refs/remotes/origin/HEAD to point to the origin/master branch.

Before running this command, the output of git branch -a was:

* master
  remotes/origin/master

After running the command, the error no longer happened and the output of git branch -a was:

* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master

(Other answers have already identified that the source of the error is HEAD not being set for origin. But I thought it helpful to provide a command which may be used to fix the error in question, although it may be obvious to some users.)

Additional information:

For anybody inclined to experiment and go back and forth between setting and unsetting refs/remotes/origin/HEAD, here are some examples.

To unset:
git remote set-head origin --delete

To set:
(additional ways, besides the way shown at the start of this answer)
git remote set-head origin master to set origin/head explicitly
OR
git remote set-head origin --auto to query the remote and automatically set origin/HEAD to the remote's current branch.

References:

This SO Answer
This SO Comment and its associated answer
git remote --help see set-head description
git symbolic-ref --help

User · Answer

For those experiencing this error on CI CD  adding the line below worked for me on my GitHub Actions CI CD workflow right after running pip install pyflakes diff-cover      git fetch origin master refs remotes origin master   This is a snippet of the solution from the diff-cover github repo       Solution  diff-cover matches source files in the coverage XML report   with source files in the git diff  For this reason  it s important   that the relative paths to the files match  If you are using   coverage py to generate the coverage XML report  then make sure you   run diff-cover from the same working directory    I got the solution on the links below  It is a documented diff-cover error    https   diff-cover readthedocs io en latest  README html https   github com Bachmann1234 diff cover blob master README rst  Hope this helps  -

User · Answer

Sometimes things might be simpler  I came here with the exact issue and tried all the suggestions  But later found that the problem was just the local file path was different and I was on a  different folder   -   eg -     myproject mygitrepo app    git diff app TestFile txt  should have been     myproject mygitrepo app    git diff TestFile txt

User · Answer

If origin points to a bare repository on disk  this error can happen if that directory has been moved  even if you update the working copy s remotes   For example    mv  path to origin  somewhere else   git remote set-url origin  somewhere else   git diff origin master fatal  ambiguous argument  origin   unknown revision or path not in the working tree    Pulling once from the new origin solves the problem     git stash   git pull origin master   git stash pop

User · Answer

This worked for me on win replace REL PATH TO FILE with the relative path to the file to remove Removing sensitive data from a repository The docs say full path - but that errored for me -so I tried rel path and it worked     lt from the repo dir gt git filter-branch --force --index-filter  git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch REL PATH TO FILE  --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

User · Answer

The git diff command typically expects one or more commit hashes to generate your diff  You seem to be supplying the name of a remote   If you had a branch named origin  the commit hash at tip of the branch would have been used if you supplied origin to the diff command  but currently  with no corresponding branch  the command will produce the error you re seeing  It may be the case that you were previously working with a branch named origin   An alternative  if you re trying to view the difference between your local branch  and a branch on a remote would be something along the lines of   git diff origin  lt branchname gt   git diff  lt branchname gt  origin  lt branchname gt   Or other documented variants   Edit  Having read further  I realise I m slightly wrong  git diff origin is shorthand for diffing against the head of the specified remote  so git diff origin   git diff origin HEAD  compare local git branch with remote branch   Why is  quot origin HEAD quot  shown when running  quot git branch -r quot     It sounds like your origin does not have a HEAD  in my case this is because my remote is a bare repository that has never had a HEAD set   Running git branch -r will show you if origin HEAD is set  and if so  which branch it points at  e g  origin HEAD - gt  origin  lt branchname gt

[git] fatal: ambiguous argument 'origin': unknown revision or path not in the working tree

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