Many thanks to all who have responded to my question. I have found that something is, indeed, modifying the inodes for all the files in my repository. Our systems administrator executes a backup using "tar" with the "--atime-preserve" flag. It is this flag that modifies the "changed time" in the inode, and causes gitk to show that all my files have changed. Thanks, Scott. On 28 September 2012 21:40, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Scott Batchelor <scott.batchelor@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> I'm fairly new to git and am witnessing some strange behavior with git >> that I suspect may be a bug. Can anyone set my mind at rest. >> >> Every so often (I've not quite figured out the exact set of >> circumstances yet) > > Figure that circumstances out. That is the key to the issue. > Something in your workflow is futzing with the inode data of the > files in your working tree behind your back. It sometimes is a > virus scanner. > > "git diff-*" plumbing commands are meant to be used after running > "git update-index --refresh" once in the program and when the caller > of these commands (in your case, gitk) knows that any change in the > information returned by lstat(2) on the paths in the working tree > files since that call indicate real changes to the files. > > "git status" internally runs an equivalent of "--refresh" before it > goes to find changes, so after running it, until that something > smudges the inode data behind your back, "gitk" will not be > confused. > -- 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