Skip to main content

Git–Dubious ownership

Today I had a strange Git error message I never got before. When I tried to execute any action on a local Git repo, it fails with the following error:

git status fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at 'C:/projects/examplerepo' 'C:/projects/examplerepo' is owned by: 'S-1-5-32-544' but the current user is: 'S-1-5-21-1645522239-329068152-682003330-18686'

To add an exception for this directory, call: git config --global --add safe.directory C:/projects/examplerepo


Image generated by AI

What does this error mean and how can we fix it?

Let’s find out!

This error means that the current user is not the owner of the git repository folder. Before git executes an operation it will check this and if that is not the case it will return the error above. The reason why this check exists is because of security reasons. Git tries to avoid that another user can place files in our git repo folder.

You can check the owner of a directory by executing Get-Acl . in Powershell:

PS c:\Projects\examplerepo Get-Acl .


    Directory: c:\Projects


Path           Owner                   Access
----           -----                   ------
examplerepo    BUILTIN\Administrators  BUILTIN\Administrators  Allow  FullControl...

We can fix the error above by taking over the ownership of the folder:

takeown /F "C:\projects\examplerepo" /R /D Y

Or by following the suggestion mentioned by the git error message and add an exception for this directory in our git config file:

git config --global --add safe.directory C:/projects/examplerepo

Remark: Notice the use of the forward slash in the folder path although we are on Windows.

More information

Get-Acl (Microsoft.PowerShell.Security) - PowerShell | Microsoft Learn

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more