# Git - There are too many unreachable loose objects

### To Reproduce:

* `git cm 'some_message'`
    
* commit successfully, but git showed the message below:
    

```plaintext
error: The last gc run reported the following. Please correct the root
cause and remove gc.log.
Automatic cleanup will not be performed until the file is removed.
warning: There are too many unreachable loose objects; run 'git prune'
to remove them.
```

### Why git shows this error message?

> *You are seeing this error because you have too many dangling commits for git to automatically clean up.*

### What is "dangling commit" & "dangling blob"?

Dangling objects exist but they are never directly used.

* **Dangling blob**
    

A change that made it to the staging area/index but never got committed.

* **Dangling commit**
    

A commit isn’t directly linked to any child commit, branch, tag, or other references.

(Information from: [Stack overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18514659/git-what-is-a-dangling-commit-blob-and-where-do-they-come-from))

### What will “dangling objects” have an influence on?

Actually, the worst situation is dangling objects take up too much space of the hard disk.

### How to solve the "too many dangling objects" problem?

1. `git fsck`
    

This will verify the connectivity, validity of the object and list those dangling objects if they exist.

2\. `git gc --prune=now`

* `git prune`
    

This will remove dangling objects.

* `git gc`
    

> *\-prune=<date> Prune loose objects older than date (default is 2 weeks ago, overridable by the config variable gc.pruneExpire). — prune=now prunes loose objects regardless of their age and increases the risk of corruption if another process is writing to the repository concurrently; see “NOTES” below. — prune is on by default.*

---

Reference:

* [https://community.perforce.com/s/article/16023](https://community.perforce.com/s/article/16023)
    
* [https://www.cnblogs.com/dylancao/p/6625431.html](https://www.cnblogs.com/dylancao/p/6625431.html)
    
* [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18514659/git-what-is-a-dangling-commit-blob-and-where-do-they-come-from](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18514659/git-what-is-a-dangling-commit-blob-and-where-do-they-come-from)
    
* [https://git-scm.com/docs/git-fsck](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-fsck)
    
* [https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc)