How to resolve unstaged changes not shown by "git status"

Question

Consider

$ git status
On branch chore/nbsp-fix-2
nothing to commit, working directory clean
$ git rebase -i master
Cannot rebase: You have unstaged changes.
Please commit or stash them.

How do I work out what the unstaged changes are that are preventing git from rebasing?

Some background: Someone managed to add files with a non-breaking space (%A0) in the name. This has caused problems with the repository. The files show up as not tracked and git thinks the repository is dirty — a similar problem.

The technique I was using to correct the problem is to create a new branch before those changes were made and cherry-pick the few commits after those changes. Unfortunately I am now in this situation. I can imagine there is some other file or other remnant of that problem preventing me from moving forward. I am now in this position after cherry-picking the single commit following the bad file names.

I'm looking for suggestions for getting past this problem. What is rebase seeing that status does not see?

Answer 1

Turns out git rebase is a shell script in /usr/libexec/git-core/git-rebase, grepping for "have unstaged changes" in that dir gets exactly one hit, in git-sh-setup, in this function:

require_clean_work_tree () {
    git rev-parse --verify HEAD >/dev/null || exit 1
    git update-index -q --ignore-submodules --refresh
    err=0

    if ! git diff-files --quiet --ignore-submodules
    then
        echo >&2 "Cannot $1: You have unstaged changes."
        err=1
    fi

[ ... ]

and rebase does invoke that. So, to answer

What is rebase seeing that status does not see?

your question, try git diff-files.