I note this just in case it helps someone else track down a similar problem, not because I think any change needs to be made to git, as a version of meld new enough to not be affected by this problem is 5 years old. At $DAYJOB, I recently encountered a problem after upgrading from (don't laugh) git 1.7.1 to 1.7.8.3: one developer stated that meld failed to run, instead displaying the error 'Wrong number of arguments (Got 5)'. We determined that this user was running a very old version of meld (1.1.1) from his home directory, as opposed to the also very old system version of meld (1.1.5). It turns out that the check added in f61bd9c mergetools/meld: Use '--output' when available fails on meld 1.1.1, leading git to incorrectly believe the --output flag is supporrted: $ meld-1.1.1 --output /dev/null --help >/dev/null 2>&1; echo $? 0 # i.e., detected as supported The test as written gives the correct ("not supported") result with meld 1.1.5: $ meld-1.1.5 --output /dev/null --help >/dev/null 2>&1; echo $? 2 # i.e., detected as supported so if you encounter the message 'Wrong number of arguments (Got 5)' from meld, then check whether you have an ancient version of meld. If for some reason you can't upgrade to at least 1.1.5, maybe you'd find the following configuration flags useful: [merge] tool = ancientmeld [mergetool "ancientmeld"] cmd = meld-1.1.1 \"$LOCAL\" \"$MERGED\" \"$REMOTE\" Jeff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html