Git configuration user.name doesn't work

Question

I installed Git for Windows 7 today. I don't know much about Git yet and I'm following http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-First-Time-Git-Setup and videos from YouTube on that subject. On the videos people install Git and go to the command line and use

git config --global user.name = "My Name" 

and

git config --global user.email = "[email protected]" 

and it creates .gitconfig file in C:/Users/admin/.gitconfig with correct values for them.

After running the above lines of code three times this is what I got in that file:

[user]     name = =     email = =     name = = 

Why isn't it working? I followed the official tutorial and I see that it works for other people on YouTube but not for me.

Answer 1

You're not using the correct syntax: there shouldn't be any equal sign between user.name and "My name", or between user.email and "[email protected]". For instance, when you run

git config --global user.name = "My Name" 

the command interprets the = character as the string value passed to the user.name key, and the rest of the line ("My Name") is silently ignored. That's why your .gitconfig file ends up containing

[user]     name = =     email = = 

Everything should work if you use the correct syntax:

See also VonC's answer about relevant changes in Git 2.13.