Git Windows: Cannot clone/checkout repository paths with spaces

Question

I am trying to checkout a repository with paths that have spaces. git clone/checkout failed. The following error is returned

fatal: cannot create directory at 'main-path/some-folder-with-space /another-folder': No such file or directory

Resolved by:

1. Download project zip from github.
2. Extract the project.
3. git init
4. git remote add origin [email protected]:MainRepo/project.git
5. git fetch --all

Project is now successfully cloned to my windows machine. I can checkout the remote branches without any errors.

Vitric

checkout [this] (#19181112) may help you – Carpentry

It seems Windows and NTFS doesn't handle spaces at the start or the end of a file or folder name rather well so I would try to avoid this. My attempts to reproduce a problem seems to indicate that Windows itself will silently strip away these spaces when creating the folder, and will silently ignore the spaces when attempting to access the folder from .NET, but not from other tools not based on .NET. – Amenra

Answer 1

Put the address in quotes

git clone "some/folder/with spaces/here.git"

Derbyshire

Answer 2

Assuming you're on the command line, you can just escape spaces with \.

I tried with git clone ../some\ folder\ with\ spaces/.

EDIT: The target folder also contains spaces. No Problem. Can you elaborate on how you tried to clone? Are you using command line or some gui?

Constitutional

I am simply cloning a whole project but it is failing because some of the folders inside contain spaces [email protected]:comp/project.git – Vitric

It doesn't look like it contains spaces, it looks like it ends with a space. – Amenra

Answer 3

This was resolved by using a lower version of Git Bash (1.9.5) I was using version 2.5.1 when I encountered this issue.

Vitric