As the only developer at my company who runs Windows regularly, I’m accustomed to working around occasional Unix-specific behaviors in our build and deployment systems. Cygwin makes most stuff just work, I can fix simple incompatibilities myself, and as a last resort I can always boot into OSX for a while if needed.
One oddity that took me quite some time to diagnose, though, was Git’s strange behavior when dealing with files in our repo whose names contained a colon.
What happens when you sync a file with a colon in the filename?
Besides the inital drive prefix (e.g. C:), Windows does not permit the colon character in file or directory paths. Unix has no such restriction. So what happens if a Git repo of Unix origin contains a file with a colon in the name, and that repo is cloned on a Windows machine?
I’ve created a sample repo that contains a single file foo:bar with the content hello. Cloning the repo with a default installation of Git for Windows you get no errors or warnings:
Full Article - http://latkin.org/blog/2016/07/20/git-for-windows-accidentally-creates-ntfs-alternate-data-streams/
