Why doesn t git recognize that my file has been changed therefore git add not working

Question

I am  trying to push my files to github using bash  They are already on there  and I am uploading a newer version with new lines and code  etc  But when I try git add and then git status it says   On branch master nothing to commit  working directory clean  And the file I am using was just modified

User · Answer

We ve had this happen on Windows when changing files by transferring differences via the WinMerge tool  Apparently WinMerge  at least the way it s configured on my computer  sometimes doesn t update the timestamps of files it changes   On Windows  git status  uses  among other things  a file s time stamp and changes in the file s size to determine whether or not a file has changed  So since the time stamp wasn t updated  it only had the file size to go by  Unfortunately the file in question was a simple version file where the content changed from 7 1 2 to 7 2 0  In other words  the file size also remained unchanged  Other files that were also changed by WinMerge and didn t have their time stamps updated but had a different size after the change were detected by git status just fine

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TL DR  Are you even on the correct repository   My story is bit funny but I thought it can happen with someone who might be having a similar scenario so sharing it here   Actually on my machine  I had two separate git repositories repo1 and repo2 configured in the same root directory named source  These two repositories are essentially the repositories of two products I work off and on in my company  Now the thing is that as a standard guideline  the directory structure of source code of all the products is exactly the same in my company    So without realizing I modified an exactly same named file in repo2 which I was supposed to change in repo1  So  I just kept running command git status on repo1 and it kept giving the same message      On branch master      nothing to commit  working directory clean   for half an hour   Then colleague of mine observed it as independent pair of eyes and brought this thing to my notice that I was in wrong but very similar looking repository  The moment I switched to repo1 Git started noticing the changed files   Not so common case  But you never know

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My Git client  Gitg  caused this issue for me  Normal commands that I would usually run weren t working  Even touching every file in the project didn t work   I found a way to fix it and I m still not sure what caused it  Copy your project directory  The missing files will show up in the copied directory s git status  Renaming might do the same thing

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When you edit a file in Visual Studio it gets listed in git changes instantly even if the file is not saved  So all you need to do is just to save the file manually  Ctrl S for the currently displayed file or Ctrl Shift S for all project files  and git bash will pick them up

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What kind of file do you tried to upload  Now I just spend almost an hour to upload my css modification  But this css compiled from a styl file therefore git just ignored it  When I changed the styl source then everything worked   Hope it helps

User · Answer

Check your  gitignore file  You may find that the file  or extension of the file  or path to the file you are trying to work with matches an entry in  gitignore  which would explain why that file is being ignored  and not recognized as a changed file    This turned out to be the case for me when I had a similar problem

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Sometimes depend and by git version and if you forget to do git add     To check about your change on repository use always git status that show all untracked and changed files  Because git diff show only added files

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I had a problem where once upon a time I set the git index to  assume unchanged  on my file   You can tell git to stop ignoring changes to the file with   git update-index --no-assume-unchanged path to file   If that doesn t help a reset may be enough for other weird cases      In practice I found removing the cached file and resetting it to work   git rm --cached path to file git reset path to file   The git rm --cached means to only remove the file from the index  and reset tells git to reload the git index from the last commit

User · Answer

i have the same problem here VS2015 didn t recognize my js files changes  removing remotes from repository settings and then re-adding the remote URL path solved my problem

User · Answer

I had a similar issue while using Sublime Text-3   After making new changes in the code and saving it  when I tried the git add   status commands the response was  branch already-up to date   I figured out  regardless saving the updates in the text editor  the file was actually unchanged   Opening file in other editor and saving the changes worked for me

User · Answer

try to use git add   then git commit

User · Answer

Like it was already discussed  the files were probably flagged with  assume-unchanged   which basicly tells git that you will not modify the files  so it doesnt need to track changes with them  However this may be affecting multiple files  and if its a large workspace you might not want to check them all one by one  In that case you can try  git update-index --really-refresh  according to the docs   Like --refresh  but checks stat information unconditionally  without regard to the  assume unchanged  setting    It will basicly force git to track changes of all files regardless of the  assume-unchanged  flags

User · Answer

I had this issue  Mine wasn t working because I was putting my files in the  git folder inside my project

User · Answer

It happend to me as well  I tried the above mentioned methods and nothing helped  Then the solution was to change the file via terminal  not GUI  I do not know why this worked but worked  After I edited the file via nano from terminal git recognized it as changed and i was able to add it and commit

User · Answer

Sounds crazy  but sometimes you are not in the right repo even though you think you are   For example  you may have moved the parent directory  but forgot to switch repos in your text editor   Or vice versa  you re in the right repo in the text editor but the wrong repo in command line   In the first situation  you make your edits in the right file but it s not the same folder that s open in your command line  so it s actually the wrong file   In the second situation  you actually did edit the right file  but your command line git won t recognize the change because you re not in the correct directory on the command line

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In general with this issue  first check that you re editing the file you think you are  I had this problem when I was editing a transpiled JavaScript file instead of the source file  the transpiled version wasn t under source control

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Ran into the issue  but it was only two directories and unknown to me was that both those directories ended up being configured as git submodules  How that happened I have no clue  but the process was to follow some of the instructions on this link  but NOT remove the directory  as he does at the end  but rather do git add path to dir

User · Answer

Make sure not to create symlinks  ln -s source dest  from inside of Git Bash for Windows   It does NOT make symlinks  but does a DEEP copy of the source to the dest  I experienced same behavior as OP on a MINGW64 terminal from Git Bash for Windows  version 2 16 2  to realize that my  edited  changes actually were in the original directory  and my git bash commands were from within a deep copy that had remained unchanged

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In my case  doing a git reset --hard deleted files  amp  left some empty folders  After inspecting the content  I noticed the directories were empty   However git ignores empty folders   Correction  git ignores all directories as it tracks content  empty folders are not content

User · Answer

I had a similar issue when I created a patch file in server with vi editor  It seems the issue was with spacing  When I pushed the patch from local  deployment was proper

User · Answer

I had the same problem  Turns out I had two copies of the project and my terminal was in the wrong project folder

User · Answer

Had a funky thing like this happening  Eclipse Kepler s git plugin was automatically marking all my project folders as ignored in the  gitignore folder   When I would got to commit on the Team menu  they would all set back to ignored  As far as I can tell  this was because I d set them as derived in the parent project  Unmarking them as dervied fixed this  I d never seen this before on Indigo  Hope it helps someon

User · Answer

well we don t have enough to answer this question so I will give you several guesses   1  you stashed your changes  to fix type  git stash pop  2  you had changes and you committed them  you should be able to see your commit in git log  3  you had changes did some sort of git reset --hard or other  your changes may be there in the reflog  type git reflog --all followed by checking out or cherry-picking the ref if you ever do find it   4  you have checked out the same repo several times  and you are in the wrong one

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I had the same issue  And the files that I needed to be committed were never declared in the  gitignore file as well  In my case adding the files forcefully using the -f flag elevated to staging and fixed the issue  git add -f  lt path to file gt

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I had some git submodule misconfiguration  I went to repo s root and issued these commands on the directories that had  git folders previously  git rm --cached sub directory path -f  Then the directories appeared in git status  You may want to make a copy of your repo before trying this just in case

User · Answer

Did you move the directory out from under your shell  This can happen if you restored your project from a backup  To fix this  just cd out and back in   cd     cd -

[git] Why doesn't git recognize that my file has been changed, therefore git add not working

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