Recently, I encountered this git error “fatal: index file smaller than expected” when my local workstation stopped working and did forced reboot. When I tried to preview the changes I did, I got this message:
$ git status
fatal: index file smaller than expected
To fix this without losing our local changes, we need to remove the corrupted index and reset back to the HEAD using this two commands:
$ rm .git/index
$ git reset HEAD .
After running those commands, everything is fixed.
$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified: resources/views/header.php
modified: resources/views/footer.php
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")