Renaming a folder on the GitHub website
I ran into an issue recently where I had started a git repository while working on my Mac, and made a folder with a question mark (?) in it.
That is a valid folder name on Mac, but not on Windows, so when I tried to clone the repository onto my WIndows PC later, the clone kept failing because of the folder name!
error: invalid path '<funky file name here>'
fatal: unable to checkout working tree
warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.
You can inspect what was checked out with 'git status'
and retry with 'git restore --source=HEAD :/'
So, I had to figure out a solution to rename my folder from the GitHub website, from my PC. It’s not as intuitive as renaming a file, but I found a couple very easy options!
Edit it from the filename editor
Did you know you can add and delete folders from the filename editor itself on GitHub? I didn’t, but there’s a nice blog post on the subject from 2013 here.
So, in my case, I could go into a file inside the folder in question, hit the button to edit the file, and then update the folder name using this method.
Change the name using the GitHub web-based editor
When you’re in any GitHub repository, you can hit the period (.
) key and it will open the GitHub web editor! You can also do this by changing github.com
to github.dev
in the URL.
When you do that, a VSCode-like editor will open, allowing you to edit folders and files to your heart’s content! In my particular case, I was able to edit my folder in the web editor, then use the git extension in the editor to commit the change with one click.
It’s done!
Now I can clone my no-longer-weirdly-named folder onto my Windows PC with no issues! Yee haw!