GIT: "fatal: unable to write new_index file" while commit

Stepan Kuzmin picture Stepan Kuzmin · Sep 15, 2010 · Viewed 26.6k times · Source

When I try to commit changes to local repo, I have got following message:
fatal: unable to write new_index file

Answer

VonC picture VonC · Sep 15, 2010

As this thread illustrates, this is usually a disk space issue:

$ git status
fatal: unable to write new_index file

One cause of this that I found was that my file system had run out of space.
Finding large directories with something like the following helped clean up some log files that had run wild :

$ du -h / | grep ^[0-9.]*G

Note: you can also see it for

Problem still remained so I ran File Monitor from Sysinternals Suite.
It seems that Eclipse is accessing index file constantly and blocks command line git

Yeah, looks like Windows Defender strikes again. I always forget to disable that damn thing. I can't believe how broken it is. Destroys Blu-ray playback at home, breaks Git at work...