Unlink of file Failed Should I try again

Question

Something wrong is going on with one of the files in my local git repository  When I m trying to change the branch it says   Unlink of file  templates media container html  failed  Should I try again   y n    What could that mean

User · Answer

I had this issue and solved it by the command   git gc The above command remove temp and unnecessary files   Garbage collector

User · Answer

If you are developing a web application  a common reason is to forget shutting down the server  For example this could be a simple Node js process  or on windows your IIS process running more unobtrusive as background process

User · Answer

I tried git gc and it resolved my problem

User · Answer

I ran into this issue in Windows  you might want to run the git bash as an administrator and then perform the desire commands  that solved the issue for me

User · Answer

I was able to solve this by opening Powershell as Administrator and from there  git checkout  lt branch name gt

User · Answer

You might see that error less often with Git 2 29  Q4 2020   the  quot unlink quot  emulation on MinGW has been optimized  See commit 680e0b4  17 Aug 2020  by Jeff Hostetler  Jeff-Hostetler    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 5a04826  19 Aug 2020   mingw  improve performance of mingw unlink   Signed-off-by  Jeff Hostetler Signed-off-by  Johannes Schindelin   Update mingw unlink   to first try to delete the file with existing permissions before trying to force it  Windows throws an error when trying to delete a read-only file  The mingw unlink   compatibility wrapper always tries to  wchmod 666  the file before calling  wunlink   to avoid that error  However  since most files in the worktree are already writable  this is usually wasted effort  Update mingw unlink   to just call DeleteFileW   directly and if that succeeds return  If that fails  fall back into the existing code path to update the permissions and use  wunlink   to get the existing error code mapping

User · Answer

As i am using gitkraken and command prompt   i ran into the same issue  And then i run  git gc command it resolved my problem  So i am happy and want share some of the points which might be helpful   What git gc will do    git gc removing unreachable objects which may have been created from prior invocations of git add   When to run git gc   From doc  users are encouraged to run this task on a regular basis within each repository to maintain good disk space utilization and good operating performance   How to make it auto-configurable   Some git commands may automatically run git gc  see the --auto flag below for details  If you know what you   re doing and all you want is to disable this behavior permanently without further considerations  just do  git config --global gc auto 0

User · Answer

After run command  git rm -rf foo bar   I see error  Unlink of file  foo bar  failed  Should I try again   y n    Because another program is using this file  For example  when I run Java web application in debug model or run web application on server  I can t delete log file  Turn off application sever  or turn off debug process   re-try  git rm -rf foo bar   I see file has been deleted

User · Answer

On Windows 8  I ran git gc and it said git gc was already running  I ran git gc --force and the garbage collector ran   I could then switch branches and merge without any issues  try git gc --force   Perhaps the gc process didn t stop gracefully for one reason or another

User · Answer

I ran into this issue running git Bash and Eclipse EGit at the same time  Solution  close Eclipse  Also wouldn t hurt to run git gc as  khilo mentioned

User · Answer

After trying various solutions finally git clean -f helped me   EDIT  I hit the problem again few times - closing all processes dependent on git seems to help  like gitbash  Eclipse IDE  etc

User · Answer

I got this problem in Windows  I closed my IDE  Android Studio  and selected YES in git shell  It worked

User · Answer

This could mean that another program is using the file  which is preventing git from  moving  the file into or out of the working directory when you are attempting to change branches    I have had this happen on Windows Vista where eclipse is the program  using  the file  The file may not be actually open in eclipse but may have been opened by a process run by eclipse    In this event  try closing the file in any applications that might have used it  If that doesn t work  completely exit any applications which may have opened the file

User · Answer

I had this kind of issue on Windows 7 and it turned out to be due to some orphaned git exe process   To solve it  open Task Manager and kill all git exe processes   Since git commands are short-lived  you should normally never see any git exe in Task Manager  When they are there  it usually means something is wrong  and you should kill those processes

User · Answer

in my case there was a copy or replace window for that particular file open and hence the unlink error  i closed it and there is no unlink error

User · Answer

For my Spring Boot project I ran into this errror when attempting to run git stash   The solution was to killed all of the Java processes running on my machine

User · Answer

this solution from here worked for me   This is a Windows specific answer  so I m aware that it s not relevant to you    I m just including it for the benefit of future searchers  In my case  it was because I was running Git from a non-elevated command line   quot Run as Administrator quot  fixed it for me

User · Answer

As mentioned in the above answers  yes file must be used maybe by other java processes  simple way to get rid-off this is  just kill all java processes then execute git pull I did this  it works for me  For windows kill all java processes  taskkill  F  IM java exe  For Linux kill all java processes  kill -9  pidof java

User · Answer

This may be a separate gitk window running to see some git history   Just close that window to fix that problem

User · Answer

On Windows  saw this error on a git clone of a  fairly large  repo  Closed SmartGit and paused my backup software  CrashPlan   and after that it worked  Not sure which of the 2 did the trick  but if running either  this might do it for you too

User · Answer

I encountered this issue while doing a git pull   I tried git gc and it resolved my problem

User · Answer

Worked for me  Tried on windows   Stop your server running from IDE or close your IDE  Intellij Ecllipse or any  it will work

User · Answer

In my situation the cause was that I had ran Visual Studio as an administrator earlier in the day  When I went to switch branches the error occurred   I use GitExtensions and I run it as a regular users and files created by VS while running as an administrator   run as Administrator  still me though  were not accessible  This was the root of the cause for me  I m not sure why it happened in this situation because I regularly run VS as administrator on my primary development environment and have not experienced this problem before  But for some reason today the above scenario caused any files generated by VS during that session to be un-editable   you can read them  but not change or delete them and that is exactly what Git is going to do when you switch branches    To resolve the problem for Git I had to start windows explorer as administrator and take ownership and re give myself permissions to files and directories in question  I don t fully understand why this as I was running explorer as Administrator too but it did   You can do this for the files individually but I ended up doing this process for the root folder of the branch   So the exact steps I did to fix the problem are  Went to the top of the branch in windows explorer   right clicked properties of the directory   select the security tab   advanced options which opens the Advanced Security Settings dialog  Selected change ownership at the top   it might show you already own it    I re-selected myself  Then it returns you to the  Advanced Security Settings  dialog  at the bottom of remember to check the box  Replace all object     Then click apply The system cycles through each file and folder fixing ownership and that resolved the problem for me   For me it had locked out my migrations folder and wouldn t let me switch branches   so I originally just fixed that directory and sub tree which allowed me to switch branches but I had closed VS trying to resolved the issue   When I reopened VS I did not run VS as the Administrator and I found that could not compile the solution now   It was the same similar issue  It could not compile the solution as all of the obj directories were now non editable    so that is when I did the above steps and all was good again    Hope this helps someone

User · Answer

If you re using Docker and running Windows 10  you may want to stop the container s  where the file may be running at  To show the statuses of your containers  run  docker ps -a  To stop them  simply run  docker stop  lt container name or container id gt   This worked for me as I am running my local files using a  sh file

User · Answer

If closing your IDE and running various git commands listed here won t help  try manually killing all running Java processes  I had a Java process probably left over from eclipse that somehow kept a configuration file open

User · Answer

I solved this problem by restarting PHPStorm  insert your programm instead  as administrator

User · Answer

This might be useful for someone  if all the above didn t work for you  follow these steps    Close your IDE  mine was Eclipse  not sure if it applies to Intellij and others  or any other app that might be using git  Open git from the command line  in my case I had git bash  and run git gc as mentioned by others    This did the magic for me

User · Answer

I faced same issue while doing  git pull   I tried manual housekeeping git command  git gc  and it resolved my problem

User · Answer

I had this same error and closing the app which had the file open solved it   I was able to go back and press  Y

User · Answer

In my case there are no processes touching the file or directory  Maybe it happens if the path is very long  because an operating system restriction  windows   Try enabling the longpath support flag in the global git configuration as indicated below   git config --global core longpaths true   or try to setting the yes no answer flag if it is not conflictive for you  set GIT ASK YESNO false   If the path is too long  I ve not found a successful solution

User · Answer

As stated above  something else is holding the files  Thing is that program doesnt look suspicious for us   I was trying to do a git pull from console  while having GitKraken opened  Closing GitKraken fixed the problem

User · Answer

I had the same issue while doing a git pull and as stated above  it was because of a program that was holding those files and was not allowing a git pull  Closing the program helped  Usually  the IDE  like Eclipse  from where the files are being checked-in will be holding it in the background  Closing the same and re-running git pull solved the problem for me

User · Answer

I tried every single tip on this page and nothing helped  I was doing a git fetch and a git reset --hard origin development gave me the unkink error  I couldn t reset to the latest commit   What helped was checking out another branch and then checking out the previous branch  Very strange but it solved the problem

User · Answer

In my case  Win8 1  TortoiseGit running   it was the process called  TortoiseSVN status cache  that was locking the file   Killing it allowed me to run  git gc  without any more problems  The above process is fired up by TortoiseGit  so there is no need to manually restart it

User · Answer

After none of the above answers seemed to work  running git fetch -p did the job for me   https   git-scm com docs git-fetch

User · Answer

I had this issue with  tmp files in   git objects pack folder  I think something had failed during a push or pull  so I removed these temporary files and reset the HEAD to my last commit  Not sure if this is advised but it worked for me  Also git count-objects -v gave me a list of the  tmp files that didn t belong in the pack folder   Or to suppress the y n messages in windows git open cmd exe and run   SETX GIT ASK YESNO false   seen here  https   twitter com petercamfield status 494805475733807104

[git] Unlink of file Failed. Should I try again?

Examples related to git

Examples related to unlink