.gitconfig error

Question

I edited my .gitconfig file to add support for LabView and it appears that I did something that Git doesn't exactly like. The problem is it (Git) doesn't tell me what it doesn't like. What did I do wrong?

The error message doesn't help much either: "fatal: bad config file line 13 in c:/Users/Tanner/.gitconfig"

[gui]
    recentrepo = C:/Users/Tanner/Desktop/FIRST 2010 Beta/Java/LoganRover

[user]
    name = Tanner Smith
    email = [email protected]

[merge "labview"]
    name = LabView 3-Way Merge
    driver =  “C:\Program Files\National Instruments\Shared\LabVIEW Merge\LVMerge.exe” “C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.6\LabVIEW.exe” %O %B %A %A
    recursive = binary

And I'm not seeing a line 13, but usually that would mean something is wrong at the end? I don't know, Git is new to me.

Answer 1

I see a couple things that may be a problem. One of which is you are using curly quotes on line 10, and no quotes on line 2.

What editor did you edit this with? Please use a plain text editor like notepad or vim.

Lastly: use git-config to edit this file, rather than by hand. See the following link:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config.html

Answer 2

Hmm. You seem to have smart quotes (“ and ”) on the driver line instead of straight quotes ("). That might cause some problems. Another thing to check is to see if there is a mix of LF and CRLF line endings; that might make the line count be different than what it looks like. Try looking at your file in a hex editor, or an editor that will display all whitespace characters, to see if you have a mix of line endings.

Answer 3

Other possible problems are the file paths with spaces in them. I would remove the spaces and replace them with underscores or dashes.

Answer 4

A/ I confirm the problematic line is

    driver =  “C:\Program Files\National Instruments\Shared\LabVIEW Merge\LVMerge.exe” “C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.6\LabVIEW.exe” %O %B %A %A

B/ The quotes are not the issue (“ or "), although the resulting command will not work unless you are using " only. But at least “ does not trigger the "invalid .gitconfig" error message.

C/ The problem is the \ which have to be escaped themselves.

    driver =  “C:\\Program Files\\National Instruments\\Shared\\LabVIEW Merge\\LVMerge.exe” “C:\\Program Files\\National Instruments\\LabVIEW 8.6\\LabVIEW.exe” %O %B %A %A

will work.

Answer 5

I see forward slashes (/) on the second line and backward (\) on the LabVIEW Merge line.
Maybe they are the culprit?

Ton