Gemini CLI loads both GEMINI.md and gemini.md on case-insensitive filesystems, duplicating context #19904
Description
What happened?
On a case-insensitive filesystem (macOS/Darwin), the Gemini CLI appears to be searching for both GEMINI.md and gemini.md during context initialization. Because the filesystem is case-insensitive, both paths resolve to the exact same physical file.
As a result, the CLI loads the same instructional context twice into the model's prompt, wasting context window space.
Technical Evidence:
Running ls -lai in the root directory confirms that both names point to the same inode:
1 65116059 -rw-r--r-- 1 user group 10933 16 Feb 15:59 gemini.md
2 65116059 -rw-r--r-- 1 user group 10933 16 Feb 15:59 GEMINI.md
Attempting to ignore the duplicate via .geminiignore (adding gemini.md) did not resolve the issue.
What did you expect to happen?
The loader should deduplicate files based on their device/inode ID to avoid this redundancy on case-insensitive systems.
Client information
- CLI Version: 0.29.5
- Git Commit: 2ef872e
- Session ID: e1271f57-9a91-4673-a40e-cc2da331b334
- Operating System: darwin v22.17.0
- **Sandbox E
Login information
No response
Anything else we need to know?
No response