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"Cannot rewrite branch(es) with a dirty working directory".

I am new to Git - I tried googling for an answer to no avail.

What does this error mean? What should/can I do?

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  • it is my first git repo and I had committed something not belonging... had to correct it. Commented Jan 8, 2010 at 20:52
  • I'm having the same problem and I'm experienced with git. If I do git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter somedir -- --all I end up with my whole repo processed but if I do git filter-branch --tree-filter rm somefile` -- --all` it quits after processing the first branch with the error mentioned above. Why does filter-branch save the state of --subdirectory-filter but stop if --tree-filter changes the directory? Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 19:24

1 Answer 1

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A dirty working directory means you have uncommitted changes to your branch. You can either commit them or stash them. To stash just use:

git stash

And use this to bring your changes back

git stash apply
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3 Comments

Note that you might actually not have a dirty working directory: there's a bug in git prior to 1.7.7.1 which means git doesn't refresh its internal indexes when running filter-branch. So try running these two commands anyway - unless anyone knows of a less hacky way to force index refresh. (More discussion of this on this question .)
From a comment added at the link above: git update-index -q --ignore-submodules --refresh should update the index!
You can use git stash pop to apply the last stashed changes and remove them from the stash list. apply will apply the changes but a git stash list still shows the stashed changes.

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