I suspect that you are dual booting and browsing a git repository that is on a read-only mounted NTFS filesystem from the Linux side, and the index was created on Cygwin git? I (perhaps luckily) am fairly ignorant on the way things done in Windows environment. For one thing, I do not know if NTFS has notion of i-number, file owner uid, and other information that are used in the index (not that I want to know). If NTFS does not support the information returned by lstat(2) fully on disk, I would imagine Cygwin and NTFS filesystem driver in the Linux kernel need to fake some fields that NTFS does not natively store, and if the value faked by Cygwin and NTFS driver in the Linux kernel disagree, then it is not at all surprising to see if an unmodified path shows up as cache-dirty. - 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