Changing capitalization of filenames in Git

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: destination exists, source=src/collision/b2AABB.js, destination=src/collision/B2AABB.js 

As you can see, Git throws a fit over this. I tried renaming using just the plain old mv command as well, but Git doesn't pick up the rename (as a rename or as a new untracked file).

How can I change a file to have a different capitalization of the same name? I am on Mac OS X v10.7.3 (Lion) with Git 1.7.9.1 using Z shell (zsh) 4.3.15.

11 Answers

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.

It does work in a CMD. It might fail in a git bash (on Windows) session (see Louis-Caron's answer)

As noted by jaquinocode in the comments, if your local repository itself has that setting:

git config --local core.ignorecase false 

Considering larsks' answer, you can get it working with a single command with "--force":

 git mv --force myfile MyFile 

Sometimes you want to change the capitalization of a lot of file names on a case insensitive filesystem (e.g. on macOS or Windows). Doing individual git mv commands will tire quickly. To make things a bit easier this is what I do:

1. Move all affected files outside of the directory to, let’s say, the desktop.
2. Do a git add . -A to stage the removal of those files.
3. Rename all files on the desktop to the proper capitalization.
4. Move all the files back to the original directory.
5. Do a git add .. Git should see that the files are renamed.

Now you can make a commit saying you have changed the file name capitalization.

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.

Set ignorecase to false in git config

As the original post is about "Changing capitalization of filenames in Git":

If you are trying to change capitalisation of a filename in your project, you do not need to force rename it from Git. IMO, I would rather change the capitalisation from my IDE/editor and make sure that I configure Git properly to pick up the renaming.

By default, a Git template is set to ignore case (Git case insensitive). To verify you have the default template, use --get to retrieve the value for a specified key. Use --local and --global to indicate to Git whether to pick up a configuration key-value from your local Git repository configuration or global one. As an example, if you want to lookup your global key core.ignorecase:

git config --global --get core.ignorecase 

If this returns true, make sure to set it as:

git config --global core.ignorecase false 

(Make sure you have proper permissions to change global.) And there you have it; now your Git installation would not ignore capitalisations and treat them as changes.

As a suggestion, if you are working on multi-language projects and you feel not all projects should be treated as case-sensitive by Git, just update the local core.ignorecase file.

You can open the ".git" directory and then edit the "config" file. Under "[core]" set, set "ignorecase = true" and you are done ;)

To bulk git mv files to lowercase on macOS and git bash on Windows:

for f in *; do git mv "$f" "`echo $f | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"`"; done 

It will lowercase all files in a folder.

Answer by Vonc is totally correct, but there is still a potential situation where your rename action would not work with git for windows:

Let's say you want to rename dir/mypath to dir/myPath:

git mv dir/mypath dir/myPath 

but it fails reporting:

Rename from 'dir/mypath' to 'dir/mypath' failed. Should I try again? (y/n) 

The problem is that the bash has silently replaced your command line dir/myPath with dir/mypath because it has detected that such a path exists with a different capitalization.

The solution is to use an intermediate move operation:

git mv dir/mypath dir/mypath_temp git mv dir/mypath_temp dir/myPath 

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) 

Working example:

git mv ./src/images/poster_video.PNG ./src/images/poster_video.png 

I got the following changes on Windows in Sourcetree:

I solved it by removing the file from the file system:

Then simply discard the file I want to keep and commit:

Now everything worked as expected.

Based on this answer: