Git Tip #1

Changing Filename Case Under Cygwin

When using Git on Windows XP, you're confronted with a basic problem, case changes aren't accounted for while renaming files as Windows internals doesn't have a clue about the difference between lower and upper case. You can actually change the casing, but you can't have two files using the same name with different casing for example. This behavior obviously affect Git, which cannot detect filename case changes.

$ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /home/budu/tmp/.git/

$ touch foo

$ git add .

$ git commit -m 'test' [master (root-commit) 5a1fbb3] test 0 files
changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 fo

$ mv foo FOO

$ l total 0 drwxr-xr-x+ 1 budu None 0 Jan 11 18:15 .git/ -rw-r--r-- 1
budu None 0 Jan 11 17:59 FOO

$ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory
clean)

This is an unfortunate situation which can be easily resolved by using a simple trick. The first thing you need to do is to copy the file you want to modify to a different temporary name. Then you must use git rm on the original file and finally rename the temporary file to the new name with changed casing.

$ cp FOO bar

$ git rm foo rm 'foo'

$ mv bar FOO

$ git add .

$ git status # On branch master # Changes to be committed: # (use "git
reset HEAD ..." to unstage) # # renamed: foo -> FOO #

One thing to note here is that when calling git rm you have to use the original file name if its casing is already changed.