>> How can I help diagnose what's going on here? <snip> > Welp that's a pretty terrible bug which stems from > missing a check to see if a submodule is initialized, and not explicitly > setting GIT_DIR=.git (theres cases where we don't want this but turns > out we probably should do that here). Let me know if this fixes the > problem: That's certainly fixed the fork explosion. Indeed seems to now work as expected from my perspective... And also answers the question that I was going to ask, namely whether git ls-files --recurse-submodules should work on repos that do not contain any submodules... to which I'd hoped the answer was "yes" (because as I said it was a fatal error in v2.11.x, despite there being some output). The behaviour I'm now seeing appears to affirm that, assuming it's as expected from your perspective! Thanks for the quick response.