Why is git capitalizing my branch name prefix?

I have a really straightforward set of git commands that is resulting in some curious behavior:

Show my current local branches, and see that I'm on release/beta1:

$ git branch
  develop
  master
* release/beta1

Create a bugfix/somefeature branch from release/beta1:

$ git checkout -b bugfix/somefeature
Switched to a new branch 'bugfix/somefeature'

So far so good, right? Well, show me local branches again:

$ git branch
  BUGFIX/somefeature

The questions:

• Why did the bugfix prefix of my branch get capitalized as BUGFIX?
• Related, why is that not marked with an asterisk as my current branch?

I'm using git version 1.8.1.5 via Homebrew on OS X 10.8.2, and this happens with or without my pretty tame ~/.gitconfig in place. This happens for seemingly every bugfix/... branch.

Branches are stored as files within the .git directory. A single branch is a single file containing the hash to the commit object the branch points to.

So, as you maybe guess, when creating a branch foo/bar this will correspond to a directory with a file. So Git will create a folder foo with a file bar which then points to the commit.

This means when you add another branch foo/baz it will create a file baz and add that to the folder.

Now branch names are case insensitive for case insensitive file systems. This means that FOO/bar and foo/bar are the same. But the actual internal name is taken from the original folder and file name. So when the folder for your bugfix branch category is written in upper case, then the branches are recognized with an upper case BUGFIX.

To fix this, just go into .git/refs/heads and change the folder name to the way you like.

Thanks for the answer, it helped me find the solution to my problem, but mine was a little different. In my case, the folder with the capitalized name was not in .git/refs/heads, but in .git/refs/remotes.

Some time, long ago, someone had created two remote folders that differed only by the capitalization of the first letter. The capitalized version had been abandoned; but my repo, being from before that time, still had the capitalized spelling.

So every time I tried to pull from the new folder, it would work, but git put the local branch into the capitalized folder locally. The symptom was that I couldn't pull new changes to that branch; I had to delete my local copy and check the remote out again, every time.

My fix was to change the spelling of the folder name in .git/refs/remotes, and the problem has been resolved.

To fix this issue, you should follow what @poke said and to disable this I have used the local git commands which can switch the ignore case to false.

To identify this, you can check the ignorecase by running the below command.

git config --global --get core.ignorecase

this command will return true which indicates that git is ignoring cases. To fix this make it as false by below command.

git config --global core.ignorecase false

This will disable the ignorecase in git. Hope this will fix this issue. Make sure you are not working on multi language projects, this setting might require true in that case.