Git: File Rename

Question

I wanted to rename a folder from "Frameworks" to "frameworks", but git would not let me add the new lowercase name. I guess it treats filenames case insensitive, does it?

A git add frameworks/ -f didn't help

Answer 1

You can try:

• "git mv -f foo.txt Foo.txt" (note: this is no longer needed since git 2.0.1)
• to set ignorecase to false in the config file.

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But the issue of case (on Windows for instance) is described in the msysgit issue 228 (again: this should now -- June 2014 -- work with git 2.0.1)

there is always an option to set ignorecase to false in the config file that will force Unix like Git semantics on top of NTFS.
Git supports this behavior but it is not the default - from NTFS point of view a.txt and A.txt are the same thing - so Git tries to preserve that as most users would expect

As a better workaround, you can

git mv foo.txt foo.txt.tmp && git mv foo.txt.tmp Foo.txt

, which also changes the case of the file as stored on disk.

This blog post illustrates the same issue on MacOs during a rebase:

The default on Mac OS X file systems is that they are case-insensitive. FFFFFF.gif is the same as ffffff.gif.

If you delete the file in question, just from the file system, not from the Git index, mind you, you can merge the branch in question, and have it restore the file as if nothing happened.

The steps are pretty simple:

$ rm file/in/question.gif
$ git merge trunk

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Anyhow, remember what git mv stands for:

mv oldname newname
git add newname
git rm oldname

, so if newname and oldname clash, you need to make them different (even if it is only for a short period of time), hence the git mv foo.txt foo.txt.tmp && git mv foo.txt.tmp Foo.txt