After running git init . git config foo.bar baz git config --unset foo.bar # 1 git config foo.bar baz # 2 .git/config contains [core] repositoryformatversion = 0 filemode = true bare = false logallrefupdates = true [foo] [foo] bar = baz (1) did not remove the "foo" section when the last contained variable was unset and (2) did not reuse the empty "foo" section when "foo.bar" was set again. I would prefer if unsetting the last variable in a section would cause the heading of the now empty section would be removed. But it might also make sense to not remove an empty section and to instead reuse an empty section. That would prevent a section from being moved to eof because it became temporarily empty. Maybe that was the intention and Git at some point stopped re-using an empty section? It could even be argued that it would make sense for empty sections to be removed *and* reused (in order to "cleanup" old empty sections). The only possible combination which doesn't make sense is to not remove an empty section and to also not reuse an empty section - unfortunately that's what Git currently does. Best regards, Jonas -- 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