Git on Windows capitalized file names on origin, lower case locally

Question

We are forced to work on Windows at work, and I have lets say problem, strange situation. We have github repository, inside which we have one directory with name Something (with capitalized first letter 'S'), but in my local I see this directory with name something (note lower case 's'), git status shows that working directory is clean, even if I change this directory locally to, for example SoMeThInG git says that nothing changed. I suspect that Windows is here a problem, as it is case insensitive. Is there possibility to change this directory name from Windows level? Or maybe how to force git bash to be case sensitive?

Update

I've changed that files from mine virtual fedora, but this is just a workaround, the question remains unanswered, how to do it properly on Windows?

Answer 1

On case-insensitive file systems, Git will not detect changes just in casing. However, when committing files, the actual casing is still being reflected in the way it was added to the index.

So a git add foo and git add FOO will both work for a file that is named foo in any kind of casing (e.g. FoO or fOo), but each command will actually stage that exact name into the repository. So git add foo will make the name be case-sensitive foo and git add FOO will make the name case-sensitive FOO.

That’s why you should try to always use your command line auto completion for file names, so you don’t accidentally add files with a different casing than they actually are. Or use commands that stage the files automatically, e.g. git add ., since that will also use the actual casing.

However, since Git will not detect casing changes, once a file has been added with a particular casing, that casing will be used until you explicitly change it. That’s why it’s possible to have files in a folder foo/bar and FOO/baz that are both physically in the same location on your file system, but are represented using incompatible paths inside of Git. So you should be careful here.

That all being said, you can fix the casing later. But to do that, you need to make the change using Git instead of the file system, as Git is case sensitive while the file system isn’t. So commands like git mv will work. Same as a combination of git rm --cached and git add.

For example, to fix the above situation of the foo/FOO directory, one could do (assuming the correct name of the folder should be Foo):

git mv foo/bar Foo/bar

# or
git rm --cached FOO/baz
git add Foo/baz

You can also fix the casing for every file by removing everything from the index, and then adding it back:

git rm --cached -r .
git add .

That should stage all renames to the correct file casing.