Re: Re-casing directories on case-insensitive systems

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 11, 2008, 21:25 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801111318570.3148@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <CCDF6298-4F17-4F70-AF00-E63F2C2A2816@sb.org>

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> Wow, it's even worse. I made a tmp branch and used git-filter-branch to remove
> the commit that introduced CS4536, leaving only the cs4536 directory. But now
> if I try and run `git co master` it refuses, as it thinks it's going to
> overwrite the untracked file CS4536/introduction.txt. I believe it's actually
> seeing the tracked file cs4536/introduction.txt.

If you don't have any dirty state, I'd suggest removing your working tree before doing a "git checkout". That's needed anyway to make sure that your working tree has the same case as your index and git trees, because otherwise since the crazy filesystem thinks that CS4536/cs4536 ar ethe same, you might end up having all the wrong names.

Case differences are hard anyway, but you probably made them even harder by them using a rename that actually meant that the old name still *existed* in the filesystem (since the new name would always map to the old name thanks to your crazy filesystem).

I'm sure you can get into even more trouble with case-independent filesystems, but I think you did a pretty good job of hitting on one of the craziest cases ;)

		Linus