With git, we’ve invented a new world where revision history, checksums, and branches don’t make your filesystem slower: they make it faster. They don’t make your data bigger: they make it smaller. They don’t risk your data integrity; they guarantee integrity. They don’t centralize your data in a big database; they distribute it peer to peer.

Duplicate Signed-off-by lines.

I can see where this is being thrown inside .git/hooks/commit-msg, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what the problem was. I did a quick google search and found that others have had the same problem, but at least some members of the git community have been less than helpful. I did figure out the problem, and figured I’d share it here for others.

The commit-msg script is written using bash style shell expansions,

foo = $(bar)

while the shebang at the top of the file is set to /bin/sh. On many systems, this is not a bash shell. The solution is to simply modify the shebang to wherever bash is on your system (probably /usr/bin/bash or similar).