Git error "fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree"

As others pointed out, this message is coming from your shell prompt. The problem is that in a freshly created repository HEAD (.git/HEAD) points to a ref that doesn't exist yet.

% git init test
Initialized empty shared Git repository in /Users/jhelwig/tmp/test/.git/
% cd test
% cat .git/HEAD
ref: refs/heads/master
% ls -l .git/refs/heads
total 0
% git rev-parse HEAD
HEAD
fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions

It looks like rev-parse is being used without sufficient error checking before-hand. After the first commit has been created .git/refs/heads looks a bit different and git rev-parse HEAD will no longer fail.

% ls -l .git/refs/heads
total 4
-rw------- 1 jhelwig staff 41 Oct 14 16:07 master
% git rev-parse HEAD
af0f70f8962f8b88eef679a1854991cb0f337f89

In the function that updates the Git information for the rest of my shell prompt (heavily modified version of wunjo prompt theme for ZSH), I have the following to get around this:

zgit_info_update() {
    zgit_info=()

    local gitdir=$(git rev-parse --git-dir 2>/dev/null)
    if [ $? -ne 0 ] || [ -z "$gitdir" ]; then
        return
    fi

    # More code ...
}

I usually use Git on my Linux machine, but at work I have to use Windows. I had the same problem when trying to commit the first commit in a Windows environment.

For those still facing this problem, I was able to resolve it as follows:

git commit --allow-empty -n -m "Initial commit."