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I am trying to push my files to github using bash. They are already on there, and I am uploading a newer version with new lines and code, etc. But when I try git add and then git status it says:

On branch master

nothing to commit, working directory clean

And the file I am using was just modified.

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  • 4
    if you have already committed, then you would have nothing to commit, check git log. Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 21:18
  • 2
    what is the output of git diff ? Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 21:18
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    @maazza I get nothing out of git diff Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 21:21
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    If git diff (or git status) doesn't show anything that explains why there is nothing to add. So the question is really: "Why doesn't git recognize that my file has been changed?" Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 21:25
  • 1
    Sorry guys, I see what is happening.git doesnt see that visual studio C# changed it, but it sees when something else changed it, like notepad++ Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 21:36

41 Answers 41

224

I had a problem where once upon a time I set the git index to 'assume unchanged' on my file.

You can tell git to stop ignoring changes to the file with:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged path/to/file

If that doesn't help a reset may be enough for other weird cases.


In practice I found removing the cached file and resetting it to work:

git rm --cached path/to/file
git reset path/to/file

The git rm --cached means to only remove the file from the index, and reset tells git to reload the git index from the last commit.

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

8 Comments

git add -f path/to/the/file it will forcefully add the files for commit.
This answer was the only that helped fixing my issue. Not sure if that's a Windows thing (I have never had any problems like this in the past, either in osx or linux). So thanks to @ThorSummoner. Btw, I tried git add -f the file that was in this "assume unchanged" state, and it did not work - had to either git update-index or git rm --cached followed by a git reset to make it work.
Also, if you are really unsure about your repo current state, do this: git rm --cached -r . and then git reset ..
Worked for me, but yes only single file cases.
It works, with this command as per @rsenna git rm --cached -r . and then git reset .
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46

Sounds crazy, but sometimes you are not in the right repo even though you think you are. For example, you may have moved the parent directory, but forgot to switch repos in your text editor. Or vice versa: you're in the right repo in the text editor but the wrong repo in command line. In the first situation, you make your edits in the right file but it's not the same folder that's open in your command line, so it's actually the wrong file. In the second situation, you actually did edit the right file, but your command line git won't recognize the change because you're not in the correct directory on the command line.

9 Comments

Damn. I thought: How stupid. That can't really ever be an issue... until I check my editor's path. 😖
Haha yea this happened to me, it was due to an unused dupe directory I made during project creation and forgot to get rid of it. I spent roughly 1-2 hours trying to solve this issue... Turns out it was just that. Thanks man
Or how about having two similar files in the repo with one being ignored? PEBCAK
only discovered when clicked with right button 'reveal in file explorer' to see that I was in different files with same name!
I was updating the compiled .css file (git ignored) instead of uncompiled .scss
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33

Check your .gitignore file. You may find that the file, or extension of the file, or path to the file you are trying to work with matches an entry in .gitignore, which would explain why that file is being ignored (and not recognized as a changed file).

This turned out to be the case for me when I had a similar problem.

4 Comments

I've used gitignore.io to generate my .gitignore and I've found a line with lib/, what makes git ignore this folder. There is no problem with that - at least if this folder is not the main folder from your project, like what happened to me.
And for anyone in my case, it was actually my global excludesfile
At first, this did not work. But, I got it to work. In my case, the thing to be ignored was mentioned twice in the gitignore file. Always search for all occurrences and replace all.
@vpzomtrrfrt my problem was exactly that, the excludefile, don't know how it got there !
21

Following commands worked for me

rm .git/index

git reset

3 Comments

This worked for me. Would love to know, where you come across this and why it is happening?
I found that git reset is used to remove all staged changes. That being said, you don't need to run git reset after deleting the index because deleting the index already removes staged changes
"X worked for me" answers, with no explanation, are very low quality answers. Lazy and dangerous.
16

Like it was already discussed, the files were probably flagged with "assume-unchanged", which basicly tells git that you will not modify the files, so it doesnt need to track changes with them. However this may be affecting multiple files, and if its a large workspace you might not want to check them all one by one. In that case you can try: git update-index --really-refresh

according to the docs:

Like --refresh, but checks stat information unconditionally, without regard to the "assume unchanged" setting.

It will basicly force git to track changes of all files regardless of the "assume-unchanged" flags.

2 Comments

For me git status says no files are changed, but git add . adds two files, and git update-index --really-refresh says those two need updates, but doesn't seem to do anything. Any idea?
git status ignores files with assume-unchanged flag. However using git update-index --really-refresh will clear that flag and the files will now show up. Try running git status again to see if it now changes the changes. If you dont see anything follow this post: stackoverflow.com/questions/2363197/… most notably the command to display a listing of files that have the assume-nochanges: git ls-files -v | grep '^[[:lower:]]' If nothing helps you should create a question with more details so we can help you.
9

well we don't have enough to answer this question so I will give you several guesses:

1) you stashed your changes, to fix type: git stash pop

2) you had changes and you committed them, you should be able to see your commit in git log

3) you had changes did some sort of git reset --hard or other, your changes may be there in the reflog, type git reflog --all followed by checking out or cherry-picking the ref if you ever do find it.

4) you have checked out the same repo several times, and you are in the wrong one.

3 Comments

1) no stash found 2) I had changes and committed, so can i commit again? 3) I didn't do that 4) I am in the right repo
if you had changes and committed them, then you are good go to the next step, push or whatever your workflow is... You can commit again if you have more changes, you can even git commit --amend which will put your new changes in your last commit, don't do that if you have already shared your commit though.
Closing and reopening the terminal did it for me after cleaning a project repo.
7

I had some git submodule misconfiguration. I went to repo's root and issued these commands on the directories that had .git folders previously:

git rm --cached sub/directory/path -f

Then the directories appeared in git status.

You may want to make a copy of your repo before trying this just in case.

1 Comment

Exactly my problem. This is some weird edge case specific to submodules I think. Anyways, I did this then git restore --staged * and suddenly my changes were tracked.
6

We've had this happen on Windows when changing files by transferring differences via the WinMerge tool. Apparently WinMerge (at least the way it's configured on my computer) sometimes doesn't update the timestamps of files it changes.

On Windows, git status, uses, among other things, a file's time stamp and changes in the file's size to determine whether or not a file has changed. So since the time stamp wasn't updated, it only had the file size to go by. Unfortunately the file in question was a simple version file where the content changed from 7.1.2 to 7.2.0. In other words, the file size also remained unchanged. Other files that were also changed by WinMerge and didn't have their time stamps updated but had a different size after the change were detected by git status just fine.

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5

Had a funky thing like this happening. Eclipse Kepler's git plugin was automatically marking all my project folders as ignored in the .gitignore folder.

When I would got to commit on the Team menu, they would all set back to ignored. As far as I can tell, this was because I'd set them as derived in the parent project. Unmarking them as dervied fixed this. I'd never seen this before on Indigo. Hope it helps someon.

1 Comment

Any idea how this issue can be fixed when it happens in intellij ?
4

It happend to me as well, I tried the above mentioned methods and nothing helped. Then the solution was to change the file via terminal, not GUI. I do not know why this worked but worked. After I edited the file via nano from terminal git recognized it as changed and i was able to add it and commit.

3 Comments

Have you figured out a solution for this? I've been fighting with my git not recognising my changed files when I use any merging tool, and the only way to get git to see the changes is by using nano for my merges, which takes much more time. The conflicted files are initially visible to git, its after they're edited by the merge tool they are showing up as "unchanged" on git.
i dont know why this works and how this works but it works for me thanks
This is the only thing that works, which is a right pain
4

If you are using VSCode and switched to a new machine, you may have Autosave off, so even if you make changes to a file, git won't recognize them.

This solved my issue

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4

I tried this command on the terminal:

git config --list .

It returned me a bunch of configurations, and I noticed this as an issue:

core.ignorecase=true

The following command resolved my issue

git config core.ignorecase false

1 Comment

In my case this was the problem, as the directory rename was same name but case changed e.g. MyFolder to myfolder .
3

TL;DR; Are you even on the correct repository?

My story is bit funny but I thought it can happen with someone who might be having a similar scenario so sharing it here.

Actually on my machine, I had two separate git repositories repo1 and repo2 configured in the same root directory named source. These two repositories are essentially the repositories of two products I work off and on in my company. Now the thing is that as a standard guideline, the directory structure of source code of all the products is exactly the same in my company.

So without realizing I modified an exactly same named file in repo2 which I was supposed to change in repo1. So, I just kept running command git status on repo1 and it kept giving the same message

On branch master

nothing to commit, working directory clean

for half an hour. Then colleague of mine observed it as independent pair of eyes and brought this thing to my notice that I was in wrong but very similar looking repository. The moment I switched to repo1 Git started noticing the changed files.

Not so common case. But you never know!

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3

Did you move the directory out from under your shell? This can happen if you restored your project from a backup. To fix this, just cd out and back in:

cd ../
cd -

2 Comments

Wow, this was the case. Crazy. Another tricks didn't work at all!
lol. this was the main issue in my case. Didn't even see the current path. Thanks for mentioning it!
3

I had a similar issue while using Sublime Text-3. After making new changes in the code and saving it, when I tried the git add ./status commands the response was "branch already-up to date". I figured out, regardless saving the updates in the text editor, the file was actually unchanged. Opening file in other editor and saving the changes worked for me.

1 Comment

This is happening to me too
3

I had the same problem. Turns out I had two copies of the project and my terminal was in the wrong project folder!

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3

I had the same issue. And the files that I needed to be committed were never declared in the .gitignore file as well.

In my case adding the files forcefully using the -f flag elevated to staging and fixed the issue.

git add -f <path to file>

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3

If you are using VSCode you have to save the changes first before git can recognize them.

Press:

Ctrl + Shift + S for Window

Command + S for Mac

now git status again

Comments

3

When you edit a file in Visual Studio it gets listed in git changes instantly even if the file is not saved. So all you need to do is just to save the file manually (Ctrl+S for the currently displayed file or Ctrl+Shift+S for all project files) and git bash will pick them up.

2 Comments

This worked for me when adding comments to a .js file, working with Visual Studio Code. Thank you.
Nice, simply pressing CTRL + S while having the file open in VS Code worked for me. Thank you.
2
git update-index --really-refresh

you can try this command, it will update indexes in your folder.

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2

I had the same problem after Google Drive desktop synced my project files, Git was not detecting changes.

What I found is that this git rm --cached -r . with sudo credentials work. Then don't do git reset, this only resets git status and set everything back to the point in time of the issue.

So for Linux and mac, this works well:

`sudo git rm --cached -r .`

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1

In general with this issue, first check that you're editing the file you think you are! I had this problem when I was editing a transpiled JavaScript file instead of the source file (the transpiled version wasn't under source control).

1 Comment

thank you for mentioning this! I was so convinced I was updating the right file. Nope. face palm
1

My Git client (Gitg) caused this issue for me. Normal commands that I would usually run weren't working. Even touching every file in the project didn't work.

I found a way to fix it and I'm still not sure what caused it. Copy your project directory. The missing files will show up in the copied directory's git status. Renaming might do the same thing.

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Make sure not to create symlinks (ln -s source dest) from inside of Git Bash for Windows.

It does NOT make symlinks, but does a DEEP copy of the source to the dest

I experienced same behavior as OP on a MINGW64 terminal from Git Bash for Windows (version 2.16.2) to realize that my 'edited' changes actually were in the original directory, and my git bash commands were from within a deep copy that had remained unchanged.

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1

Ran into the issue, but it was only two directories and unknown to me was that both those directories ended up being configured as git submodules. How that happened I have no clue, but the process was to follow some of the instructions on this link, but NOT remove the directory (as he does at the end) but rather do git add path/to/dir

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1

Try renaming the File and git will recognize a new change to add the file.

For example , if the File path is Product/index.tsx then you can just rename the path to : ProductItem/index.tsx.

This worked! after attempting all the suggested solutions above.

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1

Check your excludefile in the .git folder. I had the same issue and got some entry in the excludefile (or excludesfile) that prevented git to work correctly

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0

What kind of file do you tried to upload? Now I just spend almost an hour to upload my css modification. But this css compiled from a styl file therefore git just ignored it. When I changed the styl source then everything worked.

Hope it helps.

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0

Sometimes depend and by git version and if you forget to do git add ..

To check about your change on repository use always git status that show all untracked and changed files. Because git diff show only added files.

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0

i have the same problem here VS2015 didn't recognize my js files changes, removing remotes from repository settings and then re-adding the remote URL path solved my problem.

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