Question

All of a sudden i am getting this git error: “”git status –porcelain failed”” when i do a git status…. whats up with that?

Answer 1

This error message is found in some similar StackOverflow questions: here, here. Googling brings up a mailing list message with this error. Nobody has given an explanation why it occurs, so I thought I’d add what I’ve found.

Some overview of terminology, from the man git page:

GIT COMMANDS

We divide git into high level (“porcelain”) commands and low level (“plumbing”) commands.

From the above posts, it would appear that, when git status is run, it calls git status --porcelain. man git-status helpfully informs us what the --porcelain flag is for:

–porcelain

Give the output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This is similar to the short output, but will remain
stable across git versions and regardless of user configuration. See below for details.

So the issue you have is related to the git status call, which is by default trying to format its output into something easy to parse.

From the above posts, noticably the answers here and the mailing list contentets, I would suggest that, for whatever reason, your git repository has become corrupted. If you’re using submodules, it’s possible one of those has become corrupted – this is relevant because

status run “git status –porcelain” inside each populated
submodule to see if it contains changes (link)

unless explicitly told not to do so.

As to why you seem to have a corrupted git repository? I don’t know. Several other people on StackOverflow have mentioned overwriting, moving, replacing, or generally fiddling with .git directories in their repositories. Luckily, you have a backup, though, right? 😉