git rebase error cannot stat file Permission denied

Question

I m using git  and made a small commit followed by a large one   I decided to use git rebase to squash the two commits together before pushing them    I ve never done this before   So I did  git rebase -i HEAD 2 This gave me my editor  where I chose to pick the earlier commit and squash the later one   When I saved  git said   error  cannot stat  filename   Permission denied Could not apply sha1 for later commit    initial line of text for that commit  Now   Neither commit appears when I do git log  git status tells me I m  quot Not currently on any branch  quot  One file is listed as modified and in the index  and two files are listed as untracked   My first commit had just one file  I think   and my second commit had a good dozen   What happened    How do I fix it

User · Answer

Trying to close IDE such as Sublime  VS Code  Webstorm     and close your programs that have the folder open such as CMD  Powershell  CMDer  Terminal     will fix the issue

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This error can also be caused by the fact that files are still  locked  because of prior git actions  It has to do with how the Windows filesystem layer works  I once read a nice explanation on this  but I can t remember where   In that case however  since it is basically a race condition  all you have to do is continue your interrupted rebase process  Unfortunately this happens to me all the time  so I wrote this little dangerous helper to keep my rebases going      bin sh  set -e  git checkout   git clean -df git rebase --continue   If you want to be extra sure  you can use git rebase --edit-todo to check if the next commit to be applied is really the one that failed to be applied before  Use git clean -dn to make sure you do not delete any important files

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I agree with the above  Close Visual Studio  answers    However  an additional step I had to do even after I d closed Visual Studio was to manually kill the  devenv exe  Visual Studio process in Task Explorer  After I had done this I was able to again run in gitbash      git pull   and the  cannot stat filename  error disappeared  It is perhaps due to a Visual Studio extension keeping the process open for longer even after closing

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Happened to me on Windows while rebasing inside IntelliJ integrated terminal  I noticed that I had Git bash client instance running in parallel   Closing Git bash solved the problem

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I just ran into this issue  Non of the answers here happened to solve this for me    Ended up being nuget packages I added on a branch that  once switched back to master branch  seemed to not exist  Once I did a merge it would say newtonsoft   xml could not stat  I would go to the file in question and open it but Windows threw an error back saying it can t find the file  even though I was looking right at it   How I solved this was right click delete the file  which worked but I couldnt open it because windows couldnt find it     and try to merge again and it solved the problem    Very strange   Hope this helps someone later

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If you re running webpack shut it down   Shut down your IDE as well   Should work fine after doing those things

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Just close your IDE  VISUAL STUDIO ATOM etc   It might work

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When I see this on my machine  it s worse than just a  some process has the file open    The actual ownership of the file gets jacked up to the point where I  running as administrator  can only access it after rebooting   Nearest I can tell  IIS is part of the problem   If I switch between two major branches that require a lot of files to modify  git will delete a file or directory  usually DLLs  while IIS is trying to do something or another with it   At this point  the IIS process automatically overwrites the file on disk with a version that s locked and appears to be owned by nobody   Stopping IIS at this point doesn t do it   Best I ve found out to do is to reboot  and remember to stop IIS before changing across major branches in the future   I know that doesn t really answer the question  but might be helpful to others

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I ve only ever seen this error on Windows and what it seems to mean is that something blocked git from modifying a file at the moment when it tried to a apply a patch   Windows tends to give processes exclusive access to files when it shouldn t really be necessary  in the past virus checkers have been one source of suspicion but I ve never proved this conclusively   Probably the easiest thing to do is to abort and try again  hoping that it doesn t happen the next time   git rebase --abort   You can attempt to use git apply and knowledge of what commit git was actually trying to do before doing a git rebase --continue but in all honesty I wouldn t recommend this  Most of the times I ve seen this tried there s been a better than evens chance that something gets accidentally missed or messed up

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In my case the file is a shell script    sh  file  meant to deploy our project to a local development server  for my developers   The shell script should work consistently and may be updated  so I tracked it in the same Git project as the code which the script is meant to deploy   The shell script runs one executable  and then allows that executable to run  so the script is still running  so my shell still has the script open  so it s locked   I Ctrl C d to kill the script  so now my local dev server is no longer accessible   now I can checkout freely

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I ve just had this problem  The thing is - if you had opened file  that was removed replaced after rebase  you had a branch which doesn t have a this file anymore   the git-system corrupts  So i closed all opened files and then tryied to checkout on some other branch

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Using SourceTree in Win 10  fixed the problem by closing Atom editor   Error reproduce    In branch B  create a md file  using Atom edit it  save and commit  Switch to branch A  pull down new commits from server  Try Switch back  Opps  it says    error  cannot stat  file   Permission denied

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This often happens when you have preprocessing software applications watching the project  such as Prepros or Codekit   Also  Atom and Sublime  and even Notepad    can cause this to happen if a file in the project is currently being edited   The easiest way around the issue is to close whatever has the project files open  merge your branches  and then re-open them to refresh it   This will also avoid any problems where the program is no longer aware of any changes that have happened  forcing you to refresh the project s  by hand

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My encounter with this problem was caused by my editor  Intellij   As part of its internal version controls  it had gone through and locked all hidden git files    For various reasons  I was not using the git plugin that comes with Intellij        So I opened a normal dos window as Administrator  changed to the directory  and executed  attrib -R  S   That removed the lock on the files and everything worked after that and I could sync my changes using the GitHub windows client

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An alternate solution rather than closing all apps that might be locking the directory as just about every other answer says to do  would be to use a utility that will unlock the files directory without closing everything   I hate needing to restart Visual Studio   LockHunter is the one that I use  https   lockhunter com  There are likely others out there as well  but this one has worked great for me

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Killing the w3wp exe process related to the repository fixed this for me

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if using vscode  kill terminal and open new one  else maybe close terminal too

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I exited from my text editor that was accessing the project directories  then tried merging to the master branch and it worked

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On Windows  it can be a TortoiseGIT process that blocks those files   Open task manager and end process TGitCache exe

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If the IDE you use in case you use one  might have been getting in the way as well  That s what happened to me when using QtCreator

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I just stumbled upon this thread of answers - this error is such a Bogus error   error  cannot stat  reddit app views links   Permission denied  That s all I got - when trying to merge   I read a few of the answers and then came to the realization - all I had to do was close my code editor which happens to be Atom   Once closing the editor - I ran  git merge  again and boom   it worked   What a pointless error

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I was also on a Windows machine using Git Shell when I encountered the same error   However  at the time I had multiple Git terminals open   The first terminal received the error you posted about above and the other terminal had previously ran the grunt serve terminal command from yeoman  linked below   The second terminal needed to remain open to host a local server instance   Shutting down all terminal windows running ongoing processes can cause the error to go away   At least that s what worked for me  After I shut down the second terminal window  I could easily checkout different branches and manipulate files   Grunt Serve Command - Yeoman I O http   yeoman io learning

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This can also happen when you re using SublimeText and the popup window asking you to buy the program is not closed

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In my case  I had a webpack dev server running behind

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If you have the Meld merge tool open  close that   It blocks the file overwriting

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I got this error when my VS1013 was on a branch targeting 8 1 and I was trying to checkout a 8 0 branch  I needed to tab back to VS and allow it to UpdateAll  Then I could checkout the 8 0 branch without error

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I had a similar problem  But it was very simple to resolve   On a Windows machine  my file explorer had a folder open that existed in one branch but not in the other I checked out   Closing the File explorer resolved the problem

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I have just had this under Win 7     git stash pop error  cannot stat  parentFolder subfolder   Permission denied error  cannot stat  parentFolder subfolder   Permission denied  Diagnosis   1 I went to the subfolder and it s there and I couldn t delete it    2 Use  process explorer  -  Find -  Find handles and Dlls -  put the  subfolder  name there and search   Result  It turns out it s XMLSpy has opened one of the xml there  close XML Spy and try stash pop again  it s working now

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This happens to me in Windows occasionally     error  cannot stat  filename   Permission denied   Most often I have multiple instance of bit bash open  and one of the git bash instances is in a directory that doesn t exist in the remote branch I m pulling from   Closing all but one instance of git bash solves the issue for me

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Same issue on Windows 10 64 Bit  running Git Bash version 2 9 0 windows1 Using Atom as my editor   This worked for me  I added the Git software folder  for me  this was C  Program Files Git  to the exclusions for Windows Defender   After the exclusion was added  git checkout  file  worked fine

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Try closing any programs that have the folder open  such as editors  explorer windows  command prompts  and FTP programs  This always fixes the issue for me on Windows

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Happened to me when in windows  when using photoshop   When I saved an image and then switched to a branch  leaving photoshop with the image opened  i got the git error  Close the image in photoshop and retry

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Same problem but using SourceTree  or any other git client   I m adding my answer as none of the answers correspond to my case   Changing the branch from  develop  to  main  changes the actual files and subfolders of your local folder  It can happen that a folder that didn t exist in the  master  are not completely erased and windows believe you only lost your access rights  even if you re the admin    When merging from main to develop  the git client tries to access the folder  Without access rights  it returns the mentioned error    Switching from one branch to the latest can fix the problem  and then back to master  double check if the folders files are actually locally deleted     Closing the client and or your editor does not fix the problem     Reboot helps but is a waste of time  IMHO

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We resolved permission issues by right-clicking sh exe in Program Files and by setting  Run as Administrator  in the Security tab

[git] git rebase: "error: cannot stat 'file': Permission denied"

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