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

Question

I m trying to initialize a new GIT repo from Debian  actually a VM on Virtualbox  installed and running on Mac OS X      david server-VM-001      mkdir test  david server-VM-001      cd test  david server-VM-001 test    git init Initialized empty Git repository in  home david test  git  fatal  ambiguous argument  HEAD   unknown revision or path not in the working tree  Use  --  to separate paths from revisions  david server-VM-001 test   master          What s the problem

User · Answer

I had this issue when having a custom display in my terminal when creating a new git project  I have my branch display before the pathname e g    current path   All I needed to do was do my initial commit to my master branch to get this message to go away

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I had same issue and I solved it by  pod setup  after installing cocoapods

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I usually use git on my linux machine  but at work I have to use Windows  I had the same problem when trying to commit the first commit in a Windows environment   For those still facing this problem  I was able to resolve it as follows     git commit --allow-empty -n -m  Initial commit

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Jacob Helwig mentions in his answer that      It looks like rev-parse is being used without sufficient error checking before-hand   Commit 62f162f from Jeff King  peff  should improve the robustness of git rev-parse in Git 1 9 2 0  Q1 2014   in addition of commit 1418567       For cases where we do not match  e g    doesnotexist  HEAD    we would then want to try to treat the argument as a filename    try difference   gets this right  and always unmunges in this case    However  try parent shorthand   never unmunges  leading to incorrect error messages  or even incorrect results      git rev-parse foobar   foobar fatal  ambiguous argument  foobar   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

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As others pointed out  this message is coming from your shell prompt   The problem is that in a freshly created repository HEAD   git HEAD  points to a ref that doesn t exist yet     git init test Initialized empty shared Git repository in  Users jhelwig tmp test  git    cd test   cat  git HEAD ref  refs heads master   ls -l  git refs heads total 0   git rev-parse HEAD HEAD fatal  ambiguous argument  HEAD   unknown revision or path not in the working tree  Use  --  to separate paths from revisions   It looks like rev-parse is being used without sufficient error checking before-hand   After the first commit has been created  git refs heads looks a bit different and git rev-parse HEAD will no longer fail     ls -l  git refs heads total 4 -rw------- 1 jhelwig staff 41 Oct 14 16 07 master   git rev-parse HEAD af0f70f8962f8b88eef679a1854991cb0f337f89   In the function that updates the Git information for the rest of my shell prompt  heavily modified version of wunjo prompt theme for ZSH   I have the following to get around this   zgit info update         zgit info         local gitdir   git rev-parse --git-dir 2 gt  dev null      if      -ne 0        -z   gitdir     then         return     fi        More code

[macos] GIT fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree

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