Fatal: Unable to checkout working tree

Alok Nath Saha picture Alok Nath Saha · Jul 23, 2014 · Viewed 18.5k times · Source

I am cloning the master branch from a GitHub repo onto my system. It throws this error:

Checking connectivity ...done eate file Icon fatal: unable to checkout working tree warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.

I've tried to include the suggestions for line ending problems in Windows as the help doc suggests but still I am facing the same issue.

How can this be solved?

  • Windows 7

Answer

willfliaw picture willfliaw · Sep 12, 2020

As I know of, you will want to modify any file names containing: \, /, :, *, ?, ", <, >, or |, as Windows does not comply with those symbols for file naming purposes.

A nice and simple "fix" would be to download the files as a zip archive (which is supported by github), then modify the troublesome file names in File Explorer and then, finally, extract the zip archive in your desired directory.