Today I ran into a small issue with Git when I was trying to capitalize a directory.
Normally this should change the status of the repo so that I can make a commit, while Git just doesn’t seem to pick up on it. After a little searching, I found the best way to resolve this was a simple config. According to Git’s documentation:
core.ignoreCase
If true, this option enables various workarounds to enable Git to work better on filesystems that are not case sensitive, like FAT. For example, if a directory listing finds “makefile” when Git expects “Makefile”, Git will assume it is really the same file, and continue to remember it as “Makefile”.
The default is false, except git-clone[1] or git-init[1] will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.
I didn’t set this config globally so it was supposed to be false, yet with the above info it indicates that Git will probe and set the config true for better working on case-insensitive file systems, such as Apple File System(APFS) on my Mac.
I checked a few repos that I created or cloned, which are all following the same rule with core.ignoreCase as true. This is a reasonable logic of setting up a Git repo in my mind, next time you can just manually switch the config if running into the same case, after all it should happen very rarely.
Update:
After a while I found the above change didn’t really solve the problem, as both the lowercased and uppercased directories started to appear in the Git status. I also checked the GitHub repo in which both existed as well.
Turns out the right way to do should be: git mv --force foo Foo. And since I’ve messed up already, I had to clear the cache by git rm -r --cahed foo and set core.ignoreCase back to be true. Then I pushed the commit, and confirmed that remote repo got corrected with only the uppercased directory.
Hope this can clear things up and you don’t make the same mistake as I did.