Git cannot lock ref 'HEAD': unable to resolve reference HEAD

Question

I\'m trying to commit the changes to my repository but I receive the error below:

git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false commit -q -F C:\\U         


        

Answer 1

I had the same issue after calling git commands with the root user inside the working copy. So the owner and owner group of various files under .git/ were changed to "root".

When I switched back to my user account, git could not handle this files anymore, because of the lacking permissions.

It worked again, after resetting the permissions with

sudo chown -R [MY_USER]:[MY_GROUP] .git