Changing capitalization of filenames in Git

Question

I am trying to rename a file to have different capitalization from what it had before:

git mv src/collision/b2AABB.js src/collision/B2AABB.js
fatal: destinat         


        

Answer 1

Starting Git 2.0.1 (June 25th, 2014), a git mv will just work on a case insensitive OS.

See commit baa37bf by David Turner (dturner-tw).

mv: allow renaming to fix case on case insensitive filesystems

"git mv hello.txt Hello.txt" on a case insensitive filesystem always triggers "destination already exists" error, because these two names refer to the same path from the filesystem's point of view and requires the user to give "--force" when correcting the case of the path recorded in the index and in the next commit.

Detect this case and allow it without requiring "--force".

git mv hello.txt Hello.txt just works (no --force required anymore).

---

The other alternative is:

git config --global core.ignorecase false

And rename the file directly; git add and commit.

Answer 2

This Python snippet will git mv --force all files in a directory to be lowercase. For example, foo/Bar.js will become foo/bar.js via git mv foo/Bar.js foo/bar.js --force.

Modify it to your liking. I just figured I'd share :)

import os
import re

searchDir = 'c:/someRepo'
exclude = ['.git', 'node_modules','bin']
os.chdir(searchDir)

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(searchDir):
    dirs[:] = [d for d in dirs if d not in exclude]
    for f in files:
        if re.match(r'[A-Z]', f):
            fullPath = os.path.join(root, f)
            fullPathLower = os.path.join(root, f[0].lower() + f[1:])
            command = 'git mv --force ' + fullPath + ' ' + fullPathLower
            print(command)
            os.system(command)

Answer 3

File names under OS X are not case sensitive (by default). This is more of an OS problem than a Git problem. If you remove and readd the file, you should get what you want, or rename it to something else and then rename it back.