Question

I copied my local git repo to my sites folder so that I can develop locally and then push changes to github.

When I try committing via “git commit -a” I get this message:

E325: ATTENTION

Found a swap file by the name “.git/.COMMIT_EDITMSG.swp”

      owned by: usrname   dated: Sat Feb  4 18:56:02 2012

     file name: ~myUsername/oldRepoLocation/.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG

      modified: YES

    process ID: 15435

While opening file “.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG”

         dated: Sun Feb 12 19:51:43 2012

  NEWER than swap file!

(1) Another program may be editing the same file.
If this is the case, be careful not to end up with two
different instances of the same file when making changes.
Quit, or continue with caution.

(2) An edit session for this file crashed.
If this is the case, use “:recover” or “vim -r .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG”
to recover the changes (see “:help recovery”).
If you did this already, delete the swap file “.git/.COMMIT_EDITMSG.swp”
to avoid this message.

Swap file “.git/.COMMIT_EDITMSG.swp” already exists!

Answer 1

While Vim is running, it creates one .swp file per file open in a buffer. It’s for crash recovery.

In this case, you probably copied the repo while Vim was opened to edit the commit message, thus keeping the .swp file around in the new copy. It’s safe to delete the errant swp file:

rm .git/.COMMIT_EDITMSG.swp