git aliases operate in the wrong directory

Question

Summary: the current working directory of commands run through git aliases is wrong.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to have a git alias like so:

[alias] pwd = !pwd

So git pwd is just running the bash command pwd. One would think that the two commands' outputs would be the same. Now, let's try this out a few times:

$ cd ~ $ pwd && git pwd /home/limpchimp /home/limpchimp # great! $ mkdir foo && cd foo && git init Initialized empty Git repository in /home/limpchimp/foo/.git/ $ pwd && git pwd /home/limpchimp/foo /home/limpchimp/foo # great! $ mkdir bar && cd bar $ pwd && git pwd /home/limpchimp/foo/bar /home/limpchimp/foo # uuhhhhhhhh...?

It seems that git is changing the current working directory to be the first parent directory that has a .git folder (if one exists). This is very problematic; it's screwing up certain scripts that I've written, which are meant to operate in a specific directory, and making me unable to use certain things as git aliases. Is there a way around this? How can I fix it?

Possible duplicate of Why does running command as git alias gives different results? — Jonathan Wakely
– Jonathan Wakely, Commented Apr 7, 2016 at 12:53

mtraceur · Accepted Answer · 2023-08-03 14:05:38Z

TL;DR: add cd -- \"${GIT_PREFIX:-.}\"; in front of the rest of the alias, e.g.:

[alias] pwd = !cd -- \"${GIT_PREFIX:-.}\"; pwd

This is a (mis?)feature, but you can work around it with $GIT_PREFIX as noted in this other stackoverflow question and answer:

#! /bin/sh # script to do stuff in a git dir # since we're sometimes run from a git alias we need # to cd back into $GIT_PREFIX if it's set [ "$GIT_PREFIX" != "" ] && cd -- "$GIT_PREFIX" ... rest of script ...

(As Tom Hale noted in a comment, one can shorten this using the sh / bash / POSIX-shell feature ${var:-default}, where an unset or empty-string variable value expands to the default given after the colon-dash character pair. We use the -- because bash has added options to the cd command, so for robustness we should handle a case where the prefix variable contains, say, -e. The double quotes are not necessary either: I used them above for symmetry with the test command, which the longer version above spells as [.)

Andrew C · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-07 19:13:37Z

This is clearly specified in the documentation as by design along with a workaround if needed.

Git Config Alias

Note that shell commands will be executed from the top-level directory of a repository, which may not necessarily be the current directory. GIT_PREFIX is set as returned by running git rev-parse --show-prefix from the original current directory

"This is clearly specified..." - if by clearly specified you mean the explanation for non-obvious, surprising and non-intuitive behavior being buried in a manpage that's more than 2500 lines long.

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