git checkout-index: unable to create file (File name too long)

Question

I check out my repository but there is a file with too long file name:

~/git$ git clone git+ssh://server/git/ma.git
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/git/ma/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 1855, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1594/1594), done.
remote: Total 1855 (delta 656), reused 1078 (delta 222)
Receiving objects: 100% (1855/1855), 54.14 MiB | 701 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (656/656), done.
error: git checkout-index: unable to create file four_folder/$VERYLONGNAME.pdf (File name too long)

$VERYLONGNAME is about 160 chars long. My file system is ext4 on Ubuntu 10.10.

Can anyone help me to check out the long file?

Answer 1

You might need to disable home directory encryption or checkout outside like /tmp

I think it limits the filename size to 144 characters.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1173541

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1258294

Answer 2

If you are using ubuntu's encrypted home directory feature, try checking out to a directory not under your home; ecryptfs can result in filenames becoming longer on the underlying filesystem. Otherwise, you can get the data with the following procedure:

First, navigate to the containing directory, and type git ls-files --stage. You should see a bunch of output of the following form:

100644 16890852350cb62bb9f9aec5e52eea8ba46f1192 0       somefile

Find the hash corresponding to your file of interest. Now do:

git cat-file blob 16890852350cb62bb9f9aec5e52eea8ba46f1192 > shortername.pdf

Where shortername.pdf is a new name for the file in question, replacing the hash with the one you found above. This will extract the content of the file in question.

Now just do:

git add shortername.pdf
git rm --cached $VERYLONGNAME.pdf
git commit

This will effectively rename the overly-long PDF to a more reasonable name.