Simply doing something like: $ git fast-export --all > /dev/null results in: fatal: Could not write blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391 Since this is extremely enlightening, I patched it as follows: diff --git a/builtin-fast-export.c b/builtin-fast-export.c index 2136aad..5c7bfe0 100755 --- a/builtin-fast-export.c +++ b/builtin-fast-export.c @@ -104,7 +104,8 @@ static void handle_object(const unsigned char *sha1) printf("blob\nmark :%d\ndata %lu\n", last_idnum, size); if (fwrite(buf, size, 1, stdout) != 1) - die ("Could not write blob %s", sha1_to_hex(sha1)); + die ("Could not write blob %s: %s", + sha1_to_hex(sha1), strerror(errno)); printf("\n"); show_progress(); And then running it again produced: fatal: Could not write blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391: Inappropriate ioctl for device adding to today's confusion. Nicolas - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html