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Git and the Umlaut problem on Mac OS X

Today I discovered a bug for Git on Mac OS X.

For example, I will commit a file with the name überschrift.txt with the German special character Ü at the beginning. From the command git status I get following output.

Users-iMac: user$ git status

On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#   "U\314\210berschrift.txt"
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

It seems that Git 1.7.2 has a problem with German special characters on Mac OS X. Is there a solution to get Git read the file names correct?

Solution

  • Enable core.precomposeunicode on the mac

    git config --global core.precomposeunicode true

    For this to work, you need to have at least Git 1.8.2.

    Mountain Lion ships with 1.7.5. To get a newer git either use git-osx-installer or homebrew (requires Xcode).

    That's it.