Cloning: error: filename in tree entry contains backslash" '\'

[nikolapeja6]

Describe the bug

When cloning the MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs repository though the GitHub Desktop app, it failed. The logs showed the following error:

error: [ui] `git -c credential.helper= -c protocol.version=2 clone --recursive --progress -- https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs.git C:\_repos\azure-docs` exited with an unexpected code: 128.
...
Receiving objects:  80% (2707986/3353572), 8.32 GiB | 17.28 MiB/s
error: filename in tree entry contains backslash: '\media'
fatal: Not all child objects of cfb022b5e95f43eb589592e5c3633fc41f36dba4 are reachable
fatal: index-pack failed

From the logs, the command that executed the clone was this:

git -c credential.helper= -c protocol.version=2 clone --recursive --progress -- https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs.git C:\_repos\azure-docs

However, when I tried to manually execute the command it passed. Not sure what is causing the problem.

Version & OS

GitHub Desktop Version 2.5.0 on Windows 10 (also tried on Windows Server, failed there as well).

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Clone the repo https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs form the GitHub Desktop application.

Expected behavior

Cloning should be successful.

Actual behavior

Cloning fails.

[steveward]

@nikolapeja6 thanks for the report. It looks like you are running into git-for-windows/git#2435. When we update the version of Git that ships with GitHub Desktop it should resolve this issue. Here's the relevant bit from the release notes:

• An earlier update to Git for Windows declared that a tree object is
  invalid if it has a path component with backslash in it, which was
  overly strict, which has been corrected. The only protection the
  Windows users need is to prevent such path (or any path that their
  filesystem cannot check out) from entering the index.
  (merge 224c7d70fa js/mingw-loosen-overstrict-tree-entry-checks later to maint).

Full Release Notes

[steveward]

A workaround for this bug can be found in this comment in issue #10004 by @niik.