Yaroslav Nikitenko <metst13@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > It starts to work when I remove my .cfg/config. I've no idea why it > happens. Here is its contents: > > $ more .cfg/config > [core] > repositoryformatversion = 0 > filemode = true > bare = true As Felipe notes downthread, with "core.bare=true", the repository is telling Git that it does not have a worktree. The "assume that $CWD is the top of the worktree" default would have no room to kick in. With --worktree=<there> option or GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable, you can tell Git to pretend that there is a worktree there at the specified location. Or perhaps "git -c core.bare=false", you may be able to force the "assume that $CWD is the top of the worktree" default to kick in. "git help git" has this in --git-dir=<path> Specifying the location of the ".git" directory using this option (or `GIT_DIR` environment variable) turns off the repository discovery that tries to find a directory with ".git" subdirectory (which is how the repository and the top-level of the working tree are discovered), and tells Git that you are at the top level of the working tree. If you are not at the top-level directory of the working tree, you should tell Git where the top-level of the working tree is, with the `--work-tree=<path>` option (or `GIT_WORK_TREE` environment variable) but apparently the description forgets that there are repositories with core.bare explicitly set to true. There is a room for doc improvement here. Perhaps something like this? Documentation/git.txt | 13 ++++++++----- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git c/Documentation/git.txt w/Documentation/git.txt index c463b937a8..6f8225e3ef 100644 --- c/Documentation/git.txt +++ w/Documentation/git.txt @@ -118,12 +118,15 @@ Specifying the location of the ".git" directory using this option (or `GIT_DIR` environment variable) turns off the repository discovery that tries to find a directory with ".git" subdirectory (which is how the repository and the -top-level of the working tree are discovered), and tells Git -that you are at the top level of the working tree. If you -are not at the top-level directory of the working tree, you -should tell Git where the top-level of the working tree is, +top-level of the working tree are discovered), and if the +repository has a working tree, i.e. `core.bare` is `false`, +tells Git that you are at the top level of the working tree. If you +are not at the top-level directory of the working tree, or +if `core.bare` is set to `true` and you are trying to pretend +there is a working tree associated with the repository, you +can tell Git where the top-level of the working tree is, with the `--work-tree=<path>` option (or `GIT_WORK_TREE` -environment variable) +environment variable). + If you just want to run git as if it was started in `<path>` then use `git -C <path>`.