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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T12:15:20+00:00

I am not new to git but I am newer to github and still

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I am not new to git but I am newer to github and still a beginner with bash. I was trying to set some config stuff and ending up breaking git on my local machine. Here’s what I did following these instructions on github for password caching.

$ git config --global user.name 'myusername'
$ git config --global user.email 'myemail@email.com'
$ git credential-osxkeychain
git: 'credential-osxkeychain' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
$ curl -s -O http://github-media-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/osx/git-credential-osxkeychain
$ chmod u+x git-credential-osxkeychain
$ which git
/usr/bin/git
$ sudo mv git-credential-osxkeychain /usr/bin/git
$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
^?^C

After this command git I received no response, just a new line which I eventually ctrl+c’ed out of. Now, whenever I do a git command in any repo, not just this one, the cursor just moves to a new line. I’m unable to push/pull/clone or do use of the commands I normally use.

I’ve tried reinstalling the latest version of git and still have the problem. What should I do?

Update:

I’ve tried unsetting credential.helper and uninstalling and reinstalling git. Still seeing the same behavior. I noticed that if I run just $ git the response is Usage: git credential-osxkeychain <get|store|erase>. At this point, I just want to delete credential-osxkeychain. Still unsuccessful.

As requested, the output of which -a git is:

$ which -a git
/usr/bin/git
/usr/local/git/bin/git
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When you ran this command:

    $ sudo mv git-credential-osxkeychain /usr/bin/git

    You overwrote the existing git executable with the git-credential-osxkeychain executable. That script is only meant to be run as a sub-command of Git, not standalone.

    If you use Time Machine, you can try to restore the old /usr/bin/git from a backup. Otherwise, you’ll need to reinstall Git.

    Based on the comments below, it appears that /usr/bin/git is actually still git-credential-osxkeychain, probably because Git installed itself into /usr/local instead of /usr/bin.

    If you don’t care about the keychain behavior anymore, you can remove the current git executable altogether:

    $ sudo rm /usr/bin/git

    That may cause Git to start working for you immediately if /usr/local/git/bin is in your path. Or you could simply move it to /usr/local/git/bin/git-credential-osxkeychain:

    $ sudo mv /usr/bin/git /usr/local/git/bin/git-credential-osxkeychain

    which (again, assuming your path is correct) should allow you to use it as a credential helper like you originally wanted.

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