This issue was originally reported and fixed in https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/pull/755 The problem is that file handles to temporary files (such as index.lock) were inherited by spawned processes. If those spawned processes do not exit before the parent process wants to delete or rename them, we are in big trouble. The original use case triggering the bug is a merge driver that does not quit, but listen to subsequent merge requests. However, the same issue turned up in Lars Schneider's work on making clean/smudge filters batchable (i.e. more efficient by avoiding possibly thousands of child processes, one per file). Ben Wijen (2): t6026-merge-attr: child processes must not inherit index.lock handles mingw: ensure temporary file handles are not inherited by child processes compat/mingw.h | 4 ++++ t/t6026-merge-attr.sh | 13 +++++++++++++ tempfile.c | 2 +- 3 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) Published-As: https://github.com/dscho/git/releases/tag/mingw-index-lock-v1 Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/dscho/git mingw-index-lock-v1 -- 2.9.2.691.g78954f3 base-commit: 07c92928f2b782330df6e78dd9d019e984d820a7 -- 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