warning: unable to access '.gitignore': Too many levels of symbolic links

[rjc]

I get the above warning after running git status:

$ git status
warning: unable to access '.gitignore': Too many levels of symbolic links
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

Indeed, it seems a bit convoluted:

$ ls -l .gitignore 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 foo  bar  16 Mar 22 16:12 .gitignore -> shared/gitignore
$ ls -l shared 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 foo  bar  16 Mar 22 16:12 shared -> notebooks/shared

Any chance to simplify things in order to get rid of the warning?

[rjc]

Ping.

[andreas-zeller]

Hi @rjc - I don't see this message, but I removed one level of symbolic links for .gitignore. Are things better now?

[rjc]

From what I can see, you've merely edited the .gitignore file. The issue seems to be the fact that .gitignore itself is a symbolic link:

$ git clone https://github.com/uds-se/debuggingbook.git
Cloning into 'debuggingbook'...
warning: object 0d78b95a4b40ed320caa2abe948790cb26f3a709: gitignoreSymlink: .gitignore is a symlink
# the above line repeated 2709 times with different object IDs
Updating files: 100% (1426/1426), done.

Not sure how can you not see this. Which version of Git are you using?

$ git --version
git version 2.32.0

[andreas-zeller]

Thanks! I have now made .gitignore a regular file, updated from shared/gitignore.