git-practice-Ajin/readme.md

1️⃣ Reproduce the situation

• Initially, my repo had a file called readme.md.

• I renamed it to README.md (only case change).

• After running:

  git status

  Git showed no changes, meaning it did not detect the rename.

📸 – Git did not show any changes after renaming readme.md → README.md

2️⃣ Investigate why Git is not tracking the rename

• Git depends on the filesystem to detect changes.
• On Windows (NTFS, FAT), the filesystem is case-insensitive.
• That means readme.md and README.md are treated as the same file.
• Because Windows reports no difference, Git assumes nothing happened.

3️⃣ Correct steps to make Git recognize and commit the rename

To force Git to recognize the case-only rename:

git mv -f readme.md README.md git commit -m "Rename readme.md to README.md"

4️⃣ Underlying reason

• Git itself is case-sensitive → it can distinguish between readme.md and README.md.
• Windows filesystems are case-insensitive → both names point to the same file.
• On Linux/macOS (case-sensitive), Git would automatically detect the rename.
• On Windows, we must explicitly force it with git mv -f.

✅ Conclusion: It’s due to the way Git (case-sensitive) interacts with Windows (case-insensitive) filesystems.