GIT fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree

Question

I\'m trying to initialize a new GIT repo from Debian (actually a VM on Virtualbox, installed and running on Mac OS X) :

[david@server-VM-001:~ $] mkdir test
         


        

Answer 1

Jacob Helwig mentions in his answer that:

It looks like rev-parse is being used without sufficient error checking before-hand

Commit 62f162f from Jeff King (peff) should improve the robustness of git rev-parse in Git 1.9/2.0 (Q1 2014) (in addition of commit 1418567):

For cases where we do not match (e.g., "doesnotexist..HEAD"), we would then want to try to treat the argument as a filename.
try_difference() gets this right, and always unmunges in this case.
However, try_parent_shorthand() never unmunges, leading to incorrect error messages, or even incorrect results:

$ git rev-parse foobar^@
foobar
fatal: ambiguous argument 'foobar': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git  [...] -- [...]'