Git will escape the backslash on my remote path for Network

Question

This will not work because Git will escape the double backslash into one backslash and it will throw and error that \MyTestServer\c$\Repository\TestProject is not a valid repository..

git remote add -m master TestServer "\\MyTestServer\c$\Repository\TestProject"

git fetch TestServer

Any help please..

Answer 1

You can try using forward slashes

git remote add -m master TestServer "//MyTestServer/c$/Repository/TestProject"

An older fix was to try and double-escape the slashes:

git remote add -m master TestServer "\\\\MyTestServer\\c$\\Repository\\TestProject"

Answer 2

Note: Git 2.14 (Q3 2017) will make Git more robust when using paths with backslash.
It makes sure that "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no slashes in it, cannot be a nickname (as in git remote name) for a remote on Windows, as that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.

See commit d9244ec (25 May 2017), and commit e20b5b5 (22 May 2017) by Johannes Sixt (j6t).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 7d26aa3, 02 Jun 2017)}

Windows: do not treat a path with backslashes as a remote's nick name

On Windows, the remote repository name in, e.g., git fetch foo\bar is clearly not a nickname for a configured remote repository.
However, the function valid_remote_nick() does not account for backslashes.
Use is_dir_sep() to check for both slashes and backslashes on Windows.

This was discovered while playing with Duy's patches that warn after fopen() failures.
The functions that read the branches and remotes files are protected by a valid_remote_nick() check.
Without this change, a Windows style absolute path is incorrectly regarded as nickname and is concatenated to a prefix and used with fopen().
This triggers warnings because a colon in a path name is not allowed:

C:\Temp\gittest>git fetch C:\Temp\gittest
warning: unable to access '.git/remotes/C:\Temp\gittest': Invalid argument
warning: unable to access '.git/branches/C:\Temp\gittest': Invalid argument
From C:\Temp\gittest
 * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD