How to check if git commit is doing work?

I called git commit on a massive directory with a huge number of images. I have been waiting for it to finish for easily 20 minutes now. I know git scales poorly with size so I am not sure if this is just git taking its time or if the process has been halted for some reason.

I would like to see git doing ANYTHING, printing something to the terminal, blinking a cursor... I just need to check that it's actually running and not sleeping or waiting for something, deadlocked, glitched...

Is this possible? I am on Ubuntu.

Solution

You can turn on the Debug flags to see what is going on.

GIT_TRACE=1 <command>

# For example
GIT_TRACE=1 git commit