On Sun, Sep 02, 2018 at 03:24:09AM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > On Sun, Sep 02, 2018 at 09:12:04AM +0200, Duy Nguyen wrote: > > diff --git a/builtin/commit.c b/builtin/commit.c > > index 2be7bdb331..60f30b3780 100644 > > --- a/builtin/commit.c > > +++ b/builtin/commit.c > > @@ -432,6 +432,7 @@ static const char *prepare_index(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix > > if (update_main_cache_tree(WRITE_TREE_SILENT) == 0) { > > if (reopen_lock_file(&index_lock) < 0) > > die(_("unable to write index file")); > > + ftruncate(index_lock.tempfile->fd, 0); > > if (write_locked_index(&the_index, &index_lock, 0)) > > die(_("unable to update temporary index")); > > } else > > Doh, of course. I even thought about this issue and dug all the way into > reopen_lock_file(), but for some reason temporarily forgot that O_WRONLY > does not imply O_TRUNC. > > Arguably this should be the default for reopen_lockfile(), as getting a > write pointer into an existing file is not ever going to be useful for > the way Git uses lockfiles. Opening with O_APPEND could conceivably be > useful, but it's pretty unlikely (and certainly not helpful here, and > this is the only caller). Alternatively, the function should just take > open(2) flags. > > At any rate, I think this perfectly explains the behavior we're seeing. Yes, this certainly make sense. For fun (and testing) I tried to take the problem in the other direction: * why hasn't this be detected earlier (I'm reasonably be sure I did the same operation a few times already without seeing the corruption)? * how easy it is to reproduce the problem? * Is it enough to do an interactive commit with nothing needing interactive? So I tried the following and some variants: > for i in $(seq -w 0 100); do echo $i > f$i; done > git add f* && git commit -m add f* && git rm -q f* && git commit -m rm -p but I didn't succeed to recreate the problem. So I'm still wondering what is special in my repository & tree that trigger the corruption. Anyway, thanks to al of you for looking at this so quickly. -- Luc