threads / discuss / 36697

Misspelled directory

Subject: Misspelled directory

## tl;dr

2 messages between May 19, 2014 and May 19, 2014.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Alexandre Badez· May 19, 2014, 13:05 UTC · lore

Hi,

Today I've issue a problem with git.

I've start a little project on github ( https://github.com/Djabx/mgd ). And I used https://stackedit.io/ for editing my README.md file.

When I publish it on my repo (stackedit), I've set the destination file path to "./README.md".

The problem is, that Git commit and create a '.' directory. Visible here: https://github.com/Djabx/mgd/tree/15a0ec6aee0ae08764623a304e3fc5ce96cef821

The '.' directory is not the same as the root directory; you can see that the /README.md and /./README.md are different.

I've reported the bug to stackedit ( https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/405 ) who ignore it (not their fault). Asked about it on stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23734960/how-to-delete-a-misspelled-directory And finally found a work around.

My question is, is it really "normal" that a '.' directory is accepted by git ? Shouldn't it be a "special" case ?

Thanks for your time.

-- Alex

Jeff King· May 19, 2014, 14:28 UTC · re: Alexandre Badez · lore

Re: Misspelled directory

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 03:05:42PM +0200, Alexandre Badez wrote:

> The '.' directory is not the same as the root directory; you can see
> that the /README.md and /./README.md are different.

Right. Inside git trees, "." as an entry name does not have any special meaning. However, because it does have meaning in filesystems, git itself will never create such an entry, and "git fsck" will warn about it.

> I've reported the bug to stackedit (
> https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/405
> ) who ignore it (not their fault).

GitHub normally blocks objects that do not pass "fsck" from being pushed, but there are some loopholes when going through the API, which stackedit does. I'll bring this one to the attention of the GitHub API developers.

However, the end result will probably be GitHub rejecting the API request from stackedit to create the bogus tree. So stackedit may end up wanting to adjust their code to handle the situation more gracefully anyway.

-Peff