Using the slash character in Git branch name

Question

I\'m pretty sure I saw somewhere in a popular Git project the branches had a pattern like \"feature/xyz\".

However when I try to create a branch with the slash chara

Answer 1

In my case, I forgot that there was already an unused labs branch. Deleting it solved the problem:

git branch -d labs
git checkout -b labs/feature

Explanation:

Each name can only be a parent branch or a normal branch, not both. Thats why the branches labs and labs/feature can't exists both at the same time.

The reason for this behaviour is that the branches are stored in the file system and there you also can't have a file labs and a directory labs at the same level.