Re: deleting invisible files in git

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Graham Percival 
<address@hidden> writes
>  Evidently git is intelligent enough to realize that the Capitalized 
> files are duplicates of the lower-case (does it handle symlinks?), but 
> now I can't get rid of them.
No - afaik git does NOT handle symlinks.

If I've got it right, duplicate files are impossible in git. Don't 
forget - Linus thinks in linux mode and is used to writing file 
systems...

When you commit a file to git, it calculates the MD5 hash and uses that 
as a sort of "inode". So, just as an ls in linux (can) displays the 
inode which is a pointer to where the file is actually stored, so 
listing files in git has the MD5 hash which points to where the file is 
stored ...

You're very unlikely to encounter a "MD5 collision failure" in git, but 
Linus made the design decision that if two different files had the same 
MD5, git would simply fall over with an error, and leave the resulting 
mess to the user to sort out. He made the (imho) very practical decision 
that the likelihood of a collision was far less than the likelihood of a 
screw-up in collision-handling code, hence this possible failure.

So once you've succeeded in dumping these duff entries, all you've 
actually done is remove their line in the git directory :-)

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden