Git: unable to create symlink (File name too long)

Question

I had pushed a project from Linux to Bitbucket and then cloned it on Windows. Turns out there were two symlinks, which appeared as textfiles on Windows. Since I knew where they should point to, I replaced them by copies of their destination files, committed and pushed.

Now the Bitbucket repository looks okay when I look at it from their web interface. However a git clone on my Unix machine gives me two messages like:

error: unable to create symlink ... (File name too long) 

and the two files, which were symlinks previously are absent. I tried cloning into /tmp/... to get shorter filenames, but got the same results. That suggests, that something went bad with the Bitbucket repository. I tried core.symlinks on and off.

I can live without the symlinks, but I'd like to have a working repository. Does anybody know a way (other than recreating the repository)?

Answer 1

Here's a solution that doesn't require you to go back and fix commits. After all it may not be feasible if the repo is remote or shared. It uses core.symlinks=false. You said you tried this but did not say when. You must do it before a checkout, which a normal clone does by default. So you must clone with the --no-checkout option.

git clone --no-checkout the-repo tmp-clone-dir cd tmp-clone-dir git config core.symlinks false git checkout cp the-problem-file the-problem-file.bak # make a backup git rm the-problem-file git commit -m 'Removed problem file pretending to be a symlink' the-problem-file mv the-problem-file.bak the-problem-file # restore the backup; now it will be of type file git commit -m 'Added back the problem file - now with the correct type' the-problem-file git push origin master cd .. \rm -rf tmp-clone-dir  # IMPORTANT 

That last step is important because you don't want to do more work in a repo with core.symlinks=false. It's just asking for trouble.

The above assumes that you want the file to be a file not a symlink. If it was meant to be a symlink then you'd stop after the first commit, remove the tmp-clone-dir and go back to your normal repo checkout to make the symlink and commit it.

The benefit in this method is that you don't break any related clones and branches as it preserves history. The downside to this is that the broken commit is still there and will cause problems for anyone if they attempt to use that particular bad commit.