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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


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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

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