The given repository is a clone of the vanilla kernel. /usr/bin/git --git-dir=/home/ebeer/repos/upstream/linux/.git ls-remote origin 2>&1 | less And I then see things like this: 6f38b5d6cfd43dde3058a10c68baae9cf17af912 refs/tags/v5.0-rc2 1c7fc5cbc33980acd13ae83d0b416db002fe95601e7f97f64b59514d936 refs/tags/v5.7-rc2^{} d0709bb6da2ab6d49b11643e98abdf79b1a2817f refs/tags/v5.7-rc3 This also happens when I cd into the repository and just run "git ls-remote" on some of my repositories, but much less often. The remainder of the overly long line is the correct id for that tag. The error does not happen on every run, and on some of my repositories it also differs from run to run on which tag that happens. Here it seems that it is quite stable to happening on this tag. However, a different user on the same machine running the very same command had it happen on v5.7-rc3. I have the same on my laptop, both run on Opensuse Tumbleweed, updated at the same time this morning. This seems to be quite fragile regarding latency or such: I can reproduce it with our internal git server, but not with kernel.org. This is not bound to less, we originally observed the error on a entirely different tool that tried to parse the output of ls-remote. Given that there are quite a lot of tags missing I suspect it may be that the pipe handling is somewhere broken, i.e. too much data is written to a pipe that is already full. I have not been able to provoke that using pv by rate limiting the output so far. [System Info] git Version: git version 2.33.0 cpu: x86_64 no commit associated with this build sizeof-long: 8 sizeof-size_t: 8 shell-path: /bin/sh uname: Linux 5.14.1-1-default #1 SMP Sat Sep 4 08:22:51 UTC 2021 (67af907) x86_64 Compiler Info: gnuc: 11.2 libc Info: glibc: 2.33 $SHELL (typically, interactive shell): /bin/bash [no hooks] -- Rolf Eike Beer, emlix GmbH, http://www.emlix.com Fon +49 551 30664-0, Fax +49 551 30664-11 Gothaer Platz 3, 37083 Göttingen, Germany Sitz der Gesellschaft: Göttingen, Amtsgericht Göttingen HR B 3160 Geschäftsführung: Heike Jordan, Dr. Uwe Kracke – Ust-IdNr.: DE 205 198 055 emlix - smart embedded open source