Hi, Generated this bug report using git-bugreport: Thank you for filling out a Git bug report! Please answer the following questions to help us understand your issue. What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your issue) Note: Was redirected from [here](https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/5234), on the speculation that the bug report might not be Windows-specific. 1. Open git-gui from the Windows start menu (or whatever the equivalent on Linux is) 2. Select an existing repo, either through `Open Existing Repository` or one of the paths below `Open Recent Repository` 3. From the top menu, click `Repository`, click `Git Bash` 4. In git-bash, `cd /` (expecting `/` to *not* to be a git repo), then `git status` What did you expect to happen? (Expected behavior) fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git What happened instead? (Actual behavior) On branch foo Your branch is up to date with 'origin/foo'. nothing to commit, working tree clean What's different between what you expected and what actually happened? The output messages. The expected behavior is to fatal. The actual behavior did *not* fatal. In both cases, the current working directory is at the filesystem root, which is expected to not be a git repo. Anything else you want to add: It seems that what is affecting this is that opening up git-gui sets the `GIT_DIR` env var automatically. The resulting behavior seems somewhat non-intuitive and confused myself and a colleague. The resulting behavior I expected was the behavior one would get if git-gui spawned a git-bash shell with the current working directory set to the repo's path, but *without* setting `GIT_DIR`. Please review the rest of the bug report below. You can delete any lines you don't wish to share. [System Info] git version: git version 2.45.0.windows.1 cpu: x86_64 built from commit: b5d0511969ccd9ab86395c37e5a7619d8b4e7c32 sizeof-long: 4 sizeof-size_t: 8 shell-path: /bin/sh feature: fsmonitor--daemon uname: Windows 10.0 19045 compiler info: gnuc: 13.2 libc info: no libc information available $SHELL (typically, interactive shell): C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\bash.exe [Enabled Hooks] post-checkout post-commit post-merge pre-push - Kevin Navero