How To Get Git To Recognize File Case Changes

Table of contents

• My Early Struggles With Cross-Platform Development
• Why Case Sensitivity in Git Matters
• How to Get Git to Recognize File Case Changes
• Final Thoughts

My Early Struggles With Cross-Platform Development

My very first time of deploying software onto a server, I worked on on a Windows machine and deployed my code to a Linux server, and everything broke in unexpected ways. One of the first issues I ran into was related to file paths.

What worked on Windows didn’t necessarily work Linux. It took me some time to figure out why, and it turned out that there were key differences between these operating systems that affected how my code behaved.

For instance, on Windows, paths use backslashes (\), whereas Mac and Linux use forward slashes (/). Also, line endings vary between operating systems. Windows uses CRLF (Carriage Return [↗] + Line Feed), while Linux and Mac use LF (Line Feed [↗]) alone. This caused formatting issues when moving code between environments.

But perhaps the most frustrating problem was the case sensitivity of file and folder names. On Windows, file systems are usually case-insensitive, meaning a file named example.txt and Example.txt are considered the same file. On Mac, it can be case-insensitive by default (depending on the file system), but Linux is strict about case sensitivity, which meant that a file named example.txt and Example.txt were two completely different files.

Why Case Sensitivity in Git Matters

Git [↗], by default, can sometimes overlook case changes in filenames if you are working on a case-insensitive file system, like on Windows or some Mac setups. This means if you rename a file from example.txt to Example.txt, Git might not register it as a change, and this could cause issues when your code is moved to a case-sensitive system like Linux.

If your Git installation doesn't recognize case changes, you could run into problems such as:

• Files not being properly updated after renaming them.
• Code breaking on deployment because the server can't find files that exist but with different cases.
• Confusion when you and other developers make file case changes that Git doesn’t properly track, leading to inconsistencies in the codebase.

How to Get Git to Recognize File Case Changes

Luckily, getting Git to recognize case changes is quite simple. One of the first things I now do when setting up Git in any new environment is to enable case sensitivity. Here's how you can do it:

Step 1: Enable Case Sensitivity in Git

To make sure Git recognizes case changes in filenames, you need to configure your repository to be case-sensitive. You can do this by running the following command:

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$ git config core.ignorecase false

This tells Git to stop ignoring case changes in filenames. Now, if you rename a file from example.txt to Example.txt, Git will pick it up as a change.

You can also set it up globally:

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$ git config --global core.ignorecase false

Step 2: Renaming Files Properly

If you have already renamed a file and Git hasn’t registered the change, you can force Git to recognize the case change by following these steps:

1. First, rename the file to something entirely different:

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   $ git mv example.txt temp.txt

2. Then, rename it back with the correct case:

   ✅ Wrap📋
   $ git mv temp.txt Example.txt

3. Finally, commit the changes:

   ✅ Wrap📋
   $ git commit -m "Renamed example.txt to Example.txt"

This will ensure that Git tracks the case change properly.

Final Thoughts

By configuring Git to be case-sensitive, you avoid the issues of case mismatches that can arise when moving code from development to production. Now that you know how to do this, I recommend you make it a default setup step in your workflow, especially if you are working across different operating systems.

Here is another article you might like 😊 How Can I Have Two Main Branches Pointing To Different Repos?