Question

The following commands

$ git co -b newbranch
$ git co oldbranch

result in “fatal: cannot exec ‘git-co’: Permission denied” error.

In the same time,

$ git checkout -b newbranch
$ git checkout oldbranch

and

$ sudo git co -b newbranch
$ sudo git co oldbranch

work as expected. Ownership rights for the .git folder are set for the user owning the home folder and 0755/0644 are the mode for .git folder/subfolder/files. There are no git-co script anywhere in the system (that is an expandable alias to git-checkout, which resides in /usr/libexec/git-core` dir).

Aliases are defined in .gitconfig of the home folder:

[alias]
co = checkout

There is no difference in git config -l output for root or unprivileged user. Still sudo git co oldbranch works and git co oldbranch does not.

What am I missing?

Gentoo / kernel 3.0.6 / git 1.7.3.4

Answer 1

The correct answer to this was actually different. Before git runs the aliases it checks the $PATH. In case the directory does not exist, or lacks permissions, git produces the "fatal: cannot exec 'git-co': Permission denied". It does not ever comes to check the aliases so git foobar will produce the same error.

Good people from the git mailing list also reminded me of an strace tool, that can help finding the entry that is returning EACCES, as in: strace -f -e execve git foobar

The credit goes to Jeff King from the git mailing list. 🙂