Hi David, Perhaps I'm confused, the cat-file manpage seems to indicate "dangling" only gets printed if I use "--follow-symlinks". However, I'm not using "--follow-symlinks" and I get "dangling" when passing ambiguous object IDs: Trying to check the ambiguous "dead" against git.git, I get: $ echo dead | git cat-file --batch-check 2>/dev/null dangling 4 dead Is the above intended? stderr shows the ambiguity and gives me hints, which is expected. Thanks.