Portable paths

Claim: every path in a repository can be checked out on any common filesystem.

• Grade: convention (a platform specification).
• Evidence: against (portable paths).
• Check: portable-paths (exact).
• Reader styles: none override it.

What it asks

• No : * ? " < > | \ and no control characters in a path component.
• No leading or trailing space, no space before the extension, no trailing period.
• No reserved device name (CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1 to COM9, LPT1 to LPT9), even with an extension.
• No two paths differing only by case; no versioned symbolic link.
• Paths shorter than 260 characters.

Why

A path one filesystem cannot create aborts the checkout and leaves the clone half-written. Windows reserves these characters and names and caps path length unless long paths are enabled (Microsoft 2024).

Limits

Accented names may be stored decomposed on macOS and recomposed by git only when configured to (Git 2023).