Trouble pushing to Github, cannot spawn sh: No such file or directory

Question

I'm having a difficult time pushing to Github..I have a repository that I had cloned, and I have made changes to it that I'd like to push back to github.

While in the repository, I do the following:

git add *

Which seems to work as I get no response, then when I do:

git commit -m "test"

I get the response:

On branch Will_branch
nothing to commit, working directory clean

which I expect is where my problem starts.

When I do:

git push origin master
git push origin my_branch

I get the error:

cannot spawn sh: No such file or directory
cannot spawn git: No such file or directory

I have gone through so many guides to no avail..thanks for any help.

Answer 1

This might be happening due to a large number of tags in your repo. Check this google-group entry, this question and another google group entry.

Basically, this is a known issue with msysgit and users on google group suggest using the ssh protocol instead as workaround:

1. Uninstall Git (this doesn't uninstall your existing repositories or SSH keys you've generated)
2. Reinstall git at C:\Git
3. Open git bash
4. run this command: export GIT_SSH=/c/Git/bin/ssh.exe

Also, the commit response you are getting suggests nothing got committed, do a git log to check if the commit actually happened.

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Another reason, as mentioned in this msysgit ticket could be the presence of spaces in your Environment variables. Moving the installation of msysgit etc to C: instead of C:\Program Files may solve it.