Git commands fatal errors even with .git present

Question

I am not sure what has happened, but git on the command line (Ubuntu 18.04) is not behaving.

When I am in my local repo space and check the status I get this

git status
fatal: not a git repository: ''

When I look at the directory structure, I see the .git directory and inside the git files. HEAD is ref: refs/heads/master

When I try and re-init git I get this

git init
fatal: The empty string is not a valid path

I have even deleted the workspace directory and git clone to pull the repo back from the remote source and I still get this weird issue with git.

When I move out of my workspace directory and create a directory elsewhere, and try and git init I get the above fatal error message as well.

BUT... When I use vscode with GitLens, it works without an issue and vscode can see the repo and commits on that repo etc.

I am not sure what has happened to my git install. I was at, I think, 2.34 via a PPA. I purged the PPA and downgraded back to 2.17 (which is the latest that Ubuntu 18.04 technically supports)

I am wondering if some other library might be stopping git on the command line to be working correctly?

Answer 1

This can happen if the GIT_DIR environment variable is set to ''. If GIT_DIR exists, git will use it to find the .git directory.

$ GIT_DIR='' git status
fatal: not a git repository: ''
$ GIT_DIR='' git init
fatal: The empty string is not a valid path

Unset that environment variable. How you do this depends on your shell.