Git Remote Error fatal protocol error bad line length character Unab

Question

I set up a git server and want now to push initially my repo from the client  I used git push origin master and get this error message   fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  Unab   I don t know what s wrong  I don t know what  Unab  is  I tried to resize the shell but it is still  Unab   I cannot find a solution for this error message   I setup the server with  authorized keys  and SSH   I can connect to it  using SSH    It seems to be a git problem   BTW  The server is set up in a Windows 7 VM

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This error message is a bit obtuse  but what it s actually trying to tell you is that the remote server didn t reply with a proper git response   Ultimately  there was a problem on the server running the git-receive-pack process   In the Git protocol  the first four bytes should be the line length   Instead  they were the characters Unab     which is probably the beginning an error message of some kind    ie  it s probably  Unable to     do something    What happens when you run ssh  lt host gt  git-receive-pack  lt path-to-git-repository gt    You should see the error message that your git client is barfing on and you may be able to correct it

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Well  I had this same issue  Windows 7   Try to get repo by password  I use Git Bash   Plink  environment variable GIT SSH    Pageant  Deleting GIT SSH  temporary  helps me  I don t know why I can t use login by pass and login with RSA at the same time

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You can redirect any output from  bashrc to stderr     inside  bashrc echo  some error warning remind message  1 gt  amp 2   git will ignore this symbols

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Changing the ssh exectuable from builtin to nativ under settings version control git did the trick for me

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I had the same kind of problem after installing GIT on Windows  At first it worked  then  a day later  after a PC reboot   it didn t anymore  and I got this     git pull fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  git    The problem was that after the reboot  the automatically started Putty  pageant exe  didn t have the private key active anymore  When you add a key in pageant  it s not a persistent setting by default  I just had to add the key again  and it worked fine  So  for that case  it s necessary to make pagenant load the key automatically  as discussed here   https   www digitalocean com community tutorials how-to-use-pageant-to-streamline-ssh-key-authentication-with-putty

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I had the same error  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  shmi  Where the shmi is user name in my case  I switched SSH from PuTTY to OpenSSH in  Git Extensions- gt Settings- gt SSH   It helped

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TL DR  Do not omit username  in your remote URLs when on Windows    On Linux and on Windows with the default ssh  you can omit the username from remote URLs  like so   git clone server-name  srv git repo-name   Because ssh s default behavior is to just use whatever username you re currently logged in with   If you re on Windows and have set up git to use plink exe so that you can use the key loaded in your pageant  then this will not work  because plink does not have this same automatic username behavior  resulting in those cryptic error messages  because it will prompt for the username     plink server-name login as      Versus     plink username server-name    logs you in      If you already cloned a repository somehow you can fix the remotes in your  git config by adding the username  to the remote URL

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We ran into this as well   Counting objects  85  done  Delta compression using up to 4 threads  Compressing objects  100   38 38   done  Writing objects  100   38 38   3 38 KiB   0 bytes s  done  Total 38  delta 33   reused 0  delta 0  Auto packing the repository for optimum performance  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  Remo error  error in sideband demultiplexer   I don t know the gitty details about what went wrong  but in our case what triggered it was that the disk on the server was full

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In my case the problem was 32-bit Putty and pageant exe - it can t communicate with 64-bit TortoisePlink exe  Replacing 32-bit Putty with a 64-bit version solved the problem

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Late answer here  but hope it will help someone  If its a protocol error  it has to do something with your local git not able to communicate to the remote git  This can happen if you cloned the repo via ssh and sometime later  you lost the keys to the repo or your ssh agent cannot find those keys anymore    Solution   Generate a new key and add it your git repo or configure your ssh agent to load the keys if you still have the keys with you  amp  not with someone else    Another quick fix is to go to your  git directory and edit the config file s  remote  origin   url from git to http so that ssh keys are not needed to push and it will revert to asking your username and password    remote  origin   url   git gitlab       com           git fetch    refs heads   refs remotes origin      Change to        remote  origin       url   http   gitlab       com           git     fetch    refs heads   refs remotes origin

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Git doesn t prompt for password and fails with similar cryptic message  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  user  if you don t have your private key authentication setup as well   https   www digitalocean com community tutorials how-to-configure-ssh-key-based-authentication-on-a-linux-server tells how to specify public key on the server  Basically add the public key to    ssh authorized keys or    ssh authorized keys2  I had to struggle a bit on how to provide private key to the Git Bash on the windows machine  Dan McClain s answer in https   serverfault com questions 194567 how-do-i-tell-git-for-windows-where-to-find-my-private-rsa-key 382801 382801 describes that  One addition to his answer  in my case the private key file was expected to be named id rsa pub

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For GitExtension users    I faced the same issue after upgrading git to 2 19 0     Solution    Tools   Settings   Git Extensions   SSH  Select  OpenSSH  instead of  PuTTY

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I had similar issue  but the exact error message was      fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  Usin   This is in Windows  with GIT SSH set to the path of plink exe of PuTTY   Possible problems and solutions    Make sure the path to plink exe is correct  Unix style path works fine too  for example  c work tools PuTTY plink exe Make sure the key agent of PuTTY  pageant exe  is running Make sure the key agent contains a valid key to access the server

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This might help someone  When I was trying to clone a project from an EC2 instance  I was getting the below error   Cloning into  repo1     fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  logi   The resolution for me includes the below steps    Ensure SSH key  public  is added updated in the EC2 instance  Ensure authentication agent  in my case its Pageant Putty Authentication Agent  is running and the corresponding private key is loaded  Use the EC2 SSH key ID for the public key for git clone  Example      git clone ssh    SSH Key ID  someaccount amazonaws com v1 repos repo1

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For me adding the same host details into Putty with the private key  convert with puttygen  worked  Any git bash commands after that had no problems

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Check if Shell access is allowed on the server

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For me it was becuase I recently added   RequestTTY force   into  ssh config  commenting this out allowed it to work

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I had same problem when I did git pull git pull fatal  protocol error  bad line length character   lt htm fatal  the remote end hung up unexpectedly I changed my remote url HTTP to SSH  and it worked for me  git remote set-url origin  quot HTTP quot  to  quot SSH quot

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In my case after fetch it was written  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  Pass  Also after push I got  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  git  Done   After reboot of Windows I had to start  PuTTY agent   pageant exe  again and add a private key that disappeared from a list of keys

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Maybe you have a statement in the server s  bashrc that produces output  I  for example had this      -s   HOME  rvm scripts rvm      amp  amp  source   HOME  rvm scripts rvm  rvm use ruby-1 9 3-p194 rails32   In this case the output from the rvm use will be  wrongly  interpreted as coming from git  So replace it by   rvm use ruby-1 9 3-p194 rails32  gt   dev null

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i also encounter that error once in a while  but when it does  it means that my branch is not up-to-date so i have to do git pull origin  lt current branch gt

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you can always have http link to your git project  You can use that instead of ssh link  This is just an option you have

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The error transformed in  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  fata  after adding the location of git-upload-pack to the system path   The problem seem to be an apostrophe added around the repository name  Looking with a tool like Process Monitor  from sys internals   that were added by the git client  It seems to be a git specific windows problem   I tried the same command line in the prompt of the server  the full error was  fatal  not a given repository  or any of the parent directories    git   In conclusion  to me it seems like a software bug  Be advised that I am not a git expert  it is first time I use git  i come from subversion and perforce

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I had the same problem as Christer Fernstrom  In my case it was a message I had put in my  bashrc that reminds me do do a backup when I haven t done one in a couple of days

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I had a similar problem on Windows using Git Bash  I kept getting this error when trying to do a git clone  The repository was on a Linux box with GitLab installed   git clone git servername path to repo fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  git    I made sure the ssh key was generated  The public key was added on GitLab  The ssh-agent was running and the generated key was added  github link    I ran out of options and then finally tried closing Git Bash and opening it again by right clicking  Run as Administrator   Worked after that

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Check your startup files on the account used to connect to the remote machine for  echo  statements  For the Bash shell these would be your  bashrc and  bash profile etc  Edward Thomson is correct in his answer but a specific issue that I have experienced is when there is some boiler-plate printout upon login to a server via ssh  Git will get the first four bytes of that boiler-plate and raise this error  Now in this specific case I m going to guess that  Unab  is actually the work  Unable     which probably indicates that there is something else wrong on the Git host

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If you use Putty  Then make sure to have Pageant running and your private key is loaded in Pageant  mouse right-click on Pageant icon on the Taskbar and click  View keys  on the menu that pops up    Otherwise when you do in cmd exe    git clone ssh   name host  path to git repo git  you get this message  fatal  protocol error  bad line length character

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After loading the SSH private key in Git Extensions  this issue gets resolved

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It could be a security access on your machine  are you running Pageant  which is a putty agent

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The following may help someone  When trying to clone a project I have on my AWS EC2 instance I was getting the following error    Cloning into  AWSbareRepo     fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  Plea   This was caused by trying to ssh as root instead of EC2-USER  if you actually ssh without doing a git clone    you will see the error msg in something along the lines of  Please login with ec2-user  Once I did a git clone as a ec2-user it was good

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In my case  basically I needed to restart my Windows

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FYI I got this same error message after I upgraded a CentOS6 container to CentOS7 -- some git operations started failing when building the container  e g     git remote show origin fatal  protocol error  bad line length character  Inva   Running ssh gave me an error I could search on     ssh git bitbucket org Invalid clock id for clock gettime  7   That led me to https   github com wolfcw libfaketime issues 63 where I realized I had forgotten I had a LD PRELOAD  usr local lib faketime libfaketime so 1 in a parent Dockerfile  Commenting that out fixed the error

[git] Git Remote: Error: fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: Unab

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