Git Checkout warning unable to unlink files permission denied

Question

I am aware that there are similar issues about git relating to the  unable to unlink  warning  but I have not been able to use them   The main difference is that this happened when I have not been dealing with submodules in any way  I have never dealt with them before    I created a branch called  upgrade   deleted my old framework files  and copied in the new ones   I used git add -A  then committed everything   When I tried to checkout the trunk branch  it responded with the following errors   warning  unable to unlink requirements views sk index php  Permission denied warning  unable to unlink requirements views sv index php  Permission denied warning  unable to unlink requirements views zh index php  Permission denied warning  unable to unlink requirements views zh cn index php  Permission denied warning  unable to unlink requirements views zh tw index php  Permission denied      etc   There are hundreds of them   At first I thought this was simply a permissions problem  and so I added group write permissions to the entire requirements directory recursively  but there was no change   Edit  As suggested in an answer below  I attempted to do the same thing but with everything else closed   I had no more luck than before   This issue is particularly debilitating as I cannot move to trunk to get back to normal development

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I ve encountered this error while running Git Bash on a windows box   In my particular case I just needed to open Git Bash as administrator

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All you need to do is provide permissions  run the command below from the root of your project       chmod ug w  lt directory path gt

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I had that problem while using IntelliJ  14 1 3 Ultimate   I wanted to revert changes in some file    Solved by closing Git Bash opened in another window - another revert trial in IntelliJ worked

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I have encountered this error and it is caused by wrong  owner group  of the file folder  You must seek assistance to your server admin to change the  owner group  of this file folder and retry using  git pull  again  Or if you are a sudoer  just sudo chown  your owner name   your group name  and try again pulling your repository  Try it  it works 100  to me

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This can also occur when    You ran a process inside a Docker container  and  Some files were generated by that process  and  The destination of the files is mounted as a volume on the Docker host  and  You are running git on the Docker host      If this is the case  stage the files you wish to commit and run   git diff --name-only --cached   xargs ls -l    Files which meet the above criteria will be prefixed with   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root       They are owned by root and not writable  which is not good  To fix that run    git diff --name-only --cached   xargs -i sh -c  sudo chown  USER  USER     chmod  w         A cleaner solution would probably be to use the --user option  see this for Docker and this for Docker compose

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I usually see that kind of error when there is a process not releasing the handle of those files   Make sure nothing is running  and then try your checkout again   Note  it can also be related with the way Git has been installed  on Windows  UAC can generate problem if msysgit is installed in C  Program or C  Program Files  see  msysgit - sh exe - fork  Permission denied - Vista 64 bit  and comment 2 of issue 437   Note  as illustrated below  a common other cause of the problem is rights issue on the directory  wrong owner   not necessarily on the file that can t be unlinked

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To those who are using Intellij  as  rtconner said this problem is not caused by git  Since your IDE is locked a file s  git cannot un-link it  So  you need to close your IDE and then try to merge  or whatever you like  it via command line

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I had the same issue   I tried few alternatives as others suggested   But finally giving correct permission to  git folder solve the issues   sudo chown -R    USER -  id -un     git

User · Answer

You don t have the access permission  maybe because you are not the owner   Fix by changing the owner to yourself   sudo chown -R your login name  path to folder

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None of the other suggestions worked for me  but this did   sudo git reflog expire --expire now --all  amp  amp  sudo git gc --prune now --aggressive

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I just had to switch user from ubuntu to my actual user name that I d first done stuff under  That fixed it

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You can change the write permissions to get it done   sudo chmod -R ug w      This command will give  w  permissions to all the folders in the current directory

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In my case the permission problem solved by setting www-data as an owner   chown -R www-data project folder name

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Make sure that any associated processes or threads are not running and perform end task or force quit as necessary   Make sure you change the ownership permission

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In my first encounter with this error my user had rights to  write  to the file but not the containing directory  Check the permissions of the directory containing the file

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git gc worked for me  in a new tab   Was getting this with every rebase  Thanks http   www saintsatplay com blog 2016 02 dealing-with-git-unlink-file-errors  W4WWNZMzZZJ

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In my case  my Windows directory is under the Dropbox folder  It is not a Git-specific issue  When a file  in this case  the lock file  has just been created  it takes Dropbox another second to do the synchronization  During that time  the file is in use by Dropbox  and any 3rd party program  in this case  Git  cannot delete the file   My solution is to quit Dropbox and therefore avoiding the behind-the-scenes magic of Dropbox s file synch

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I was having the issue with a default-settings php file in drupal 7  In this case I wasn t able to delete it or revert it just like  rtconner said  I didn t have an application or anything using this file  and it ended up being a permissions error   I added chmod 777   to the folder and then I was able to revert it no problem

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Unlink  essentially means  delete file  in this case    This error is not caused by git itself  You should have similar errors deleting those files manually  in a command line or file explorer

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on terminal on mac i just do this     sudo git checkout     to clean up everything     and then      sudo git pull origin

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I ran into this problem whenever running  git repack  or  git gc  on my OS X machines  even when running git with admin privileges  and I finally solved it after coming across this page  http   hints macworld com comment php mode view amp cid 1734  The fix is to open a terminal  go to your git repo  cd into the  git folder  and then do   chflags -R nouchg     If that was the issue  then after that  your git commands will work as normal

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I encountered this error and I think the issue was that I had  run as admin  when I started Eclipse and created the files  therefore they were owned by Admin  noticed by running  ls -la  on the folder   When I later tried to stash the files  it didn t let me   unable to unlink files  and all that   Doing a chmod on the files was the fix for me

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I had this error inside a virtual machine  running Ubuntu   when I tried to do git reset --hard   The fix was simply to run git reset --hard from the OS X host machine instead

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In my case it was a     character in a folder name prevenitng the git repo to checkout on windows

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Just in general  if this happens in Windows  and you are using tortoisegit  it is the status cache of tortoisegit  Kill that process and it will be freed

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Solved for me by setting my git client  GitExtensions  to always run in admin mode

[git] Git Checkout warning: unable to unlink files, permission denied

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