Why do I get “fatal: git status --porcelain failed”?

Question

This is a huge pain in the bum. I\'ve got this a few times before and I don\'t understand why. 5 mins ago the repo was fine and working, I move some files around (which is a

Answer 1

.git is a file in submodules and points to a directory located in your root .git directory.

In my case, I was mounting a git directory in docker and checking status there. The .git file of this submodule contained an absolute path which was invalid in docker. I edited this .git file to change the gitdir path to a relative path.

Git version: 2.7.4