Using the slash character in Git branch name

Question

I m pretty sure I saw somewhere in a popular Git project the branches had a pattern like  feature xyz    However when I try to create a branch with the slash character  I get an error     git branch labs feature error  unable to resolve reference refs heads labs feature  Not a directory fatal  Failed to lock ref for update  Not a directory   Same problem for  my initial attempt      git checkout -b labs feature   How does one create a branch in Git with the slash character

User · Answer

I forgot that I had already an unused labs branch  Deleting it solved my problem  git branch -d labs git checkout -b labs feature  Explanation  Each name can only be a parent branch or a normal branch  not both  Thats why the branches labs and labs feature can t exists both at the same time  The reason  Branches are stored in the file system and there you also can t have a file labs and a directory labs at the same level

User · Answer

It is possible to have hierarchical branch names  branch names with slash    For example in my repository I have such branch es    One caveat is that you can t have both branch  foo  and branch  foo bar  in repository   Your problem is not with creating branch with slash in name      git branch foo bar error  unable to resolve reference refs heads labs feature  Not a directory fatal  Failed to lock ref for update  Not a directory   The above error message talks about  labs feature  branch  not  foo bar   unless it is a mistake in copy n paste  i e you edited parts of session    What is the result of git branch or git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name HEAD

User · Answer

Sometimes that problem occurs if you already have a branch with the base name   I tried this   git checkout -b features aName origin features aName   Unfortunately  I already had a branch named features  and I got the exception of the question asker   Removing the branch features resolved the problem  the above command worked

User · Answer

Are you sure branch labs does not already exist  as in this thread       You can t have both a file  and a directory with the same name       You re trying to get git to do basically this     cd  git refs heads   ls -l total 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jhe jhe 41 2009-11-14 23 51 labs -rw-rw-r-- 1 jhe jhe 41 2009-11-14 23 51 master   mkdir labs mkdir  cannot create directory  labs   File exists       You re getting the equivalent of the  cannot create directory  error    When you have a branch with slashes in it  it gets stored as a   directory hierarchy under  git refs heads

User · Answer

I could be wrong  but I thought that slashes only appeared in branch names when they related to a remote repo  for example origin master

User · Answer

just had the same issue  but i could not find the conflicting branch anymore  in my case the repo had and  quot foo quot  branch before  but not anymore and i tried to create and checkout  quot foo bar quot  from remote  As i said  quot foo quot  did not exist anymore  but the issue persisted  In the end  the branch  quot foo quot  was still in the  git config file  after deleting it everything was alright

[git] Using the slash character in Git branch name

Examples related to git

Examples related to branch