case sensitive git branch names

I’ve had some fun with git again… I was checking out a remote branch with git on the command line and couldn’t pull down updates. Eventually I found out that the problem was case sensitivity in the branch name.

I used git checkout branch-name to get a local copy of the remote branch. When I tried to use git pull in that branch I got the following error message:

Your configuration specifies to merge with the ref 'refs/heads/branch-name' from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.

I tried to search for an fix, but couldn’t find anything that worked. The most common explaination for this error message is that the remote branch is missing.

Eventually I remembered that I had used a capital letter in the branch name when creating it. The actuall branch name was something like branch-Name, notice the capital N. By having the correct capitalising of the branch name during checkout, git pull works.

This was checking out from Gitlab on a Linux server and to a Windows 10 machine.