On a corporate Windows box, git pull/git fetch keeps stopping to ask:
Unlink of file '.git/objects/pack/pack-305a05....idx' failed. Should I try again? (y/n)
The cause is a security agent — SentinelOne, ZScaler, Defender — holding an open handle on the old .idx files while Git tries to repack. Git for Windows wraps unlink/rename failures in a retry prompt, and you end up babysitting every pull, mashing n.
yes n | git pull works but you have to remember to prefix it every time. The permanent fix is one line in ~/.bashrc (the Git Bash one):
export GIT_ASK_YESNO=false
Git runs the value of GIT_ASK_YESNO as a command to decide whether to retry — a non-zero exit is treated as "n". false always exits non-zero, so every prompt is silently answered "no". It's cleaner than </dev/null redirection (works regardless of whether stdin is a tty) and doesn't touch the other interactive bits — commit-message editor, credential prompts — which go through different machinery.
Answering "n" just means Git leaves the locked old pack file on disk; the new pack is already live, so the repo is fine. Once the security agent lets go, a git gc sweeps up the leftovers.
If the prompts are frequent, this cuts down how often they fire — sometimes the lock is Git's own multi-threaded pack-objects, not the AV:
git config --global pack.threads 1
This is the silence-it companion to the heavier "it's an open handle, not a permission" diagnosis — same root cause (a process holding a handle), but here you just want the nagging to stop, not to hunt the locker down.
You run claude install, it prints "successfully installed! Version: 2.1.185", but claude --version keeps reporting the old 2.1.183. Reinstalling doesn't help.
The cause: on Windows you cannot overwrite a running .exe. The native installer downloads the new build into ~/.local/share/claude/versions/<ver> fine, but the final step — copying it onto the launcher at ~/.local/bin/claude.exe — fails silently because a live claude.exe process holds that file locked. The installer reports success on the download, not on the swap.
Confirm it's this by comparing checksums of the launcher against the version store:
sha256sum ~/.local/bin/claude.exe ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.185
ls -la ~/.local/share/claude/versions/ # newest version is there, but bin/claude.exe is stale
tasklist //FI "IMAGENAME eq claude.exe" # the processes holding the lock
If the launcher hash matches an older version in the store, the swap never happened.
The clean fix is to exit every claude session and re-run claude install. But if you can't (e.g. you're driving from inside a claude session), use the fact that Windows lets you rename a locked file even though it won't let you overwrite it — the running process keeps its open handle, and a fresh file lands in the path:
cd ~/.local/bin
mv claude.exe claude.exe.old
cp ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.185 claude.exe
chmod +x claude.exe
claude --version # 2.1.185
New shells immediately pick up the new binary; running sessions keep using the old one until restarted. Delete claude.exe.old once everything has been restarted.
Note that Git Bash's bare claude (no extension) is just shell resolution of claude.exe — there's only one physical file to replace, not two. This whole trap is more likely if you have autoUpdates: false in ~/.claude.json and update manually, since background auto-update would normally retry on the next launch when nothing is locked.
When you build tooling around git repos, you eventually hit "where do I store a per-repo setting?" Committing a .toolrc pollutes the repo and needs a PR; a sidecar file in ~/.config can't easily be per-repo. The clean answer: put it straight into git config under your own namespace.
# per-repo (lands in <repo>/.git/config — local, never committed)
git config --local mux.adhocWorktree false
# per-machine, all repos (lands in ~/.gitconfig)
git config --global mux.adhocWorktree false
# read it back, normalized to true/false
git config --bool --get mux.adhocWorktree # -> false ; exit 1 if unset
git lets you invent any <section>.<key> it doesn't recognize (mux.* here) and just stores it. That hands you three things for free that you'd otherwise have to build:
- A per-repo store that never leaks —
.git/config is local to the checkout and never committed, so it won't pollute someone else's repo.
- Scope layering with native precedence —
--local (repo) transparently overrides --global (machine). One git config --get resolves the hierarchy; you don't write any "check repo, then fall back to machine" logic.
- Type parsing —
--bool normalizes false/0/no/off → false, and a non-zero exit cleanly signals "not configured" so you can fall through to your built-in default.
So a full precedence chain for a feature flag becomes: CLI flag → env var → git config (local→global) → built-in default — and the middle two scopes are entirely git's job.
One gotcha with worktrees: git config --local writes to the shared common .git/config, not the linked worktree, because worktrees share config. If your setting is meant to key off the main checkout (it usually is), that's exactly right — but don't expect two worktrees of the same repo to hold different --local values.
The decision that surfaced this: an agent launcher was hardwiring a git worktree per session (hundreds of MB on big repos, painful on a VM). The whole "make it opt-out, but where does the per-repo marker live?" problem evaporated the moment we realized git config already is a per-repo + per-machine settings store with precedence baked in.
When you want Git to ignore something that's yours — a local scratch dir, editor cruft, a personal plans/ folder, machine-local config — don't add it to the tracked .gitignore. That file is shared: a rule like plans/ or wiki-drafts/ forces your personal directory conventions onto everyone, and they don't have those dirs.
Put it in .git/info/exclude instead. Same syntax as .gitignore, but it's per-clone and never committed — so it's invisible to teammates and travels with nothing:
# .git/info/exclude
.claude/settings.local.json
.claude/plans/
.claude/wiki-drafts/
The rule of thumb: **.gitignore is for what the project should ignore (build output, node_modules/, *.user); .git/info/exclude is for what you happen to ignore on this machine.** If a teammate cloning fresh wouldn't also produce the file, it doesn't belong in the shared list.
One gotcha with worktrees: info/exclude lives in the common git dir, so it's shared across all linked worktrees of the same clone — but still not across separate clones. Find it with git rev-parse --git-common-dir if you're not sure where it is.
And if you ever need to start tracking something a blanket exclude was hiding (e.g. you had .claude excluded but now want .claude/skills/ committed), narrow the exclude line to the specific paths you still want ignored — don't delete it and shove replacement rules into the shared .gitignore.
A shell script always runs in a subshell. Any cd it executes vanishes when the script exits — the calling shell's working directory is unchanged.
The fix: source the script instead of executing it. Sourcing runs the script in the current shell, so cd sticks.
alias sw='. ~/bin/sw'
Two things to update in the script itself.
First, replace every exit with return. exit in a sourced script exits the entire shell, not just the script:
exit 1 → return 1
Second, $0 in a sourced script is the shell binary (bash), not the script path. Use ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} wherever you need the script's own location:
source "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")/git-common.sh"
script_name=$(basename "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")
The one tradeoff: functions defined inside the script leak into the shell's namespace after it returns. For a personal utility this is usually fine.