Re: What does "modified" in git status mean?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 04:57:52PM +0000, Mikolas wrote:

> So it looks something like this:
> $ git status
> # On branch master
> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> 
> $ cd foo
> $ git status
> # On branch master
> # Changes not staged for commit:
> #   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
> #   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
> #
> #       modified:   ../foo/bar

Modified files appearing only in some calls to status is definitely odd,
and may be a bug. How close is this to your actual invocation?

In particular, if "foo/bar" is modified, and you do "cd foo && git
status", then the relative path shown by "git status" should be simply
"bar", not "../foo/bar". If you did "cd other && git status", then I
would expect it to say "../foo/bar".

So was the directory you entered the same as the one that contains the
(supposedly) modified file, yielding the output above?

If that is the case, then I might suspect it has to do with path
normalization and case sensitivity. It might be worth seeing if you can
reproduce the problem with a more recent version of git. In particular,
v1.7.8 and later shipped with my 2548183 (fix phantom untracked files
when core.ignorecase is set, 2011-10-06), which fixes some weird bugs
surrounding case-insensitive file lookup.

(Actually, even if that is not the case, it would be worth upgrading and
seeing if the bug is reproducible).

> So my questions are 
> 1) Is there some way how to tell status to tell me *why* the files are marked 
> as modified?

Typically you would ask "diff" for more details. But since "diff" is not
reporting anything, that isn't helpful (and is probably indicative of a
bug).

> 2) Is it normal that git status behaves differently in different directories?

No.

-Peff