How to diagnose and fix git fatal: unable to read tree

Question

I\'m using git to manage files on a project, and keep running into this problem.

When I run git status I get the message

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Answer 1

Something that just worked for me was stashing my changes, doing a git pull, and then popping the changes back off the stash stack. My corruption might of been pretty shallow, so it probably won't work for everyone but it's worth a try.

Here's the output I got when I stashed:

work@home ~/code/project $ git stash
fatal: unable to read tree 5fd5f4d0425b42e5b478773fa643dd6fd4918188
fatal: unable to read tree 5fd5f4d0425b42e5b478773fa643dd6fd4918188
Saved working directory and index state WIP on master: d93430c Generic commit msg.
HEAD is now at d93430c An older generic message.

After that I pulled and then popped and it cleaned itself up. Again, YMMV.