How to fix it
If you can get someone else—on Linux for instance—to rename the problematic file and commit, that will do the job. Or just spin up a VM with Linux on it, clone, fix the name (and all users of it), commit, and send the update back.
The problem is Windows
Windows cannot handle any file named AUX
. You can't name a file PRN
or CON
or COM1
either.
error: invalid path 'soft/android-app/app/src/main/java/com/inti/bleapp/Aux.java'
You might object: that's not a file named AUX
. At worst, that's a file named Aux.java
.
But to Windows, that's a file named AUX
:
- Windows is case-insensitive, so
aux
, Aux
, auX
, and so on are all just way to spell AUX
.
- Windows still thinks about files with eight-dot-three names:
FILENAME.EXT
. Sure, everything seems to use long names and you can actually have files named foo.data.jpg
if you like. But deep in its crazy past, Windows used to use 8.3 names, and it insists on supporting programs that still use 8.3 names, so all files get an 8.3 name somewhere—and Aux.java
gets an 8.3 name that starts with AUX
, and having an extension doesn't get you around the forbidden file name.
The problem isn't just Windows
Those with macOS might gleefully point and laugh, but macOS has issues as well.
Linux folks can, and have in the past, saved files under names such as both ip.h
and IP.h
in the same directory. The idea here was to define the little-endian variant of the IP headers for TCP/IP in the lowercase ip.h
, and define the big-endian variant in the uppercase IP.h
. Case-folding, which both Windows and macOS do by default, gets us in trouble here.
Besides this, accented character file names—files named sch?n
or agréable
–can be built in multiple ways using UTF-8. Linux file systems can store any of the ways, and Git will just take whatever the storage method is, and put it in the committed file's name. But macOS demands one normalized form of the file name, and this causes the same kinds of problems.
What Git needs (but doesn't have)
Git needs a way to deal with this.
Git does have "sparse checkout". Sparse checkout allows you to define a set of files that will be checked out of some commit, and other files that won't—that will go into Git's index as usual but not appear in the work-tree at all.
You can use sparse checkout to check out this commit without extracting the file soft/android-app/app/src/main/java/com/inti/bleapp/Aux.java
at all. Well, that's perhaps OK, but you won't have the file.
In fact, you already don't, as the final message said:
warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.
When the checkout fails, all the other files should be available in your work-tree. It's just this one soft/android-app/app/src/main/java/com/inti/bleapp/Aux.java
that won't. If you can get work done without it, you can simulate the sparse checkout by running:
git update-index --skip-worktree soft/android-app/app/src/main/java/com/inti/bleapp/Aux.java
What Git should have are some tools to deal with these files more productively. In particular, it should be possible (and is, if you get down into the depths of Git) to extract the file under some other name, then add the renamed file under the original name if necessary. It should be possible (and is, but not with any sensible user-facing command) to rename the file and commit, after which you can check out the new commit and work with the file with a name that your OS doesn't hate.
All of this is possible because Git actually makes new commits from what is in its index, not what is in your work-tree. There's no hard requirement that the names in the index match the names in your work-tree. But all of Git's user-facing commands—git checkout
, git restore
, and git add
being the primary ones—do make this requirement today.