git status can't find diff-highlight

Question

Environment

• Mac OSX 10.12.3
• Git version 2.11.1 (installed via Homebrew)

Git had been previously working but today when I executed git status in any git directory, I got the following error:

sh: /Users/xxx/.zsh/bin/diff-highlight: No such file or directory

My $PATH is:

/Users/xxx/.composer/vendor/bin:/Documents/Ruby:/usr/texbin:/Users/xxx/.rbenv/shims:/Users/xxx/.rbenv/shims:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/Library/TeX/texbin:/Users/xxx/.composer/vendor/bin:/Documents/Ruby:/usr/texbin:/Users/xxx/.rbenv/shims:/Users/xxx/.fzf/bin

Why am I getting this error?

Answer 1

Installing/updating to the latest Git version, mostly using proper package management tools like HOMEBREW, can usually solve problems related to installations and missing scripts/tools.

For some reason my system also did not find diff-highlight when issuing Git commands. While double checking it I figured out that I had diff-highlight set for my global Git as a pager, and whenever I tried to execute git sub-command (status/show/log) the non found pager wanted to come into play:

/ > git log
/usr/local/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less -r: /usr/local/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight: No such file or directory

After installing Git again via brew install git or brew update git, it got updated to the latest (2.13.x) version, as well as all the Git tools/files have been reset to its normal place. To obtain where the brew installation puts the scripts/tools and Git commands, files, you can issue:

/ > brew info git
git: stable 2.13.0 (bottled), HEAD
Distributed revision control system
https://git-scm.com
/usr/local/Cellar/git/2.13.0 (1,463 files, 33.2MB)

Under my ~/dotfiles folder where I store my global settings, amongst others also for Git, I updated the pager setting to the proper location of the diff-highlight in the ~/dotfiles/git/gitconfig file:

[core]
    excludesfile = /Users/<user_name>/.gitignore_global
    pager = /usr/local/Cellar/git/2.13.0/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less -r

For the global settings I am using a customized version of Jack's Dotfiles.

Answer 2

I found the problem. In my .zsh directory, I had removed my subfolder /bin which had the diff-highlight executable. Putting the /bin back solved the problem.