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Unfortunately it doesn't support case-sensitive drives. I thought (for some stupid reason) since it's a *nix underpinning that it would be best to have case sen

by tibbon 16y ago

Unfortunately it doesn't support case-sensitive drives. I thought (for some stupid reason) since it's a *nix underpinning that it would be best to have case sensitivity last time I formatted. It seems that someone didn't write their paths in a flexible way (windows-like) and you have to reinstall your entire machine to run this. Steam isn't the only one effected however. The Starcraft 2 beta and World of Warcraft also don't support case sensitive volumes. Due to this I'm taking most of my evening and using Carbon Copy Cloner to dupe the drive and restore it as a case insensitive drive. I wish someone could have just done a .to_lower function at the end of their path strings.

danudey 16y ago
Unfortunately it doesn't say this anywhere so lots of UNIX/Linux converts don't know, but case-sensitive boot partitions are a terrible idea. As I'm sure you've found out, there are a great deal of large applications that don't support case-sensitivity (including, I think, Photoshop). Let this be a warning to anyone who considers it in the future: don't. You can use case-sensitivity on non-boot volumes (e.g. external drives) if you're concerned about case issues (e.g. moving data from another case-sensitive file system). Also, since the filesystem is case-insensitive (but case-preserving) anyway, you can add this to your ~/.inputrc to have readline completion (e.g. in Bash) ignore case: set completion-ignore-case on Makes life much easier.
- tibbon 16y ago
  Why is this done so well and respected in *nix land, but in Mac-world no programmer takes it into account? Seems to be a massive oversight and easily fixed by companies like Valve, Adobe and Blizzard. Less than 10 lines of code could fix this problem.
  - amock 16y ago
    It takes more than a few lines of code to make sure everything works. You now have to test on both kinds of filesystems which doubles the amount of testing you have to do.
daveGravell 16y ago
You could actually just create a separate partition to run those apps in. You can even just use a disk image http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050505184714699 http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200505051847146... You also may need to symlink some directories.

by tibbon 16y ago

danudey 16y ago

Unfortunately it doesn't say this anywhere so lots of UNIX/Linux converts don't know, but case-sensitive boot partitions are a terrible idea. As I'm sure you've found out, there are a great deal of large applications that don't support case-sensitivity (including, I think, Photoshop). Let this be a warning to anyone who considers it in the future: don't. You can use case-sensitivity on non-boot volumes (e.g. external drives) if you're concerned about case issues (e.g. moving data from another case-sensitive file system). Also, since the filesystem is case-insensitive (but case-preserving) anyway, you can add this to your ~/.inputrc to have readline completion (e.g. in Bash) ignore case: set completion-ignore-case on Makes life much easier.

tibbon 16y ago
Why is this done so well and respected in *nix land, but in Mac-world no programmer takes it into account? Seems to be a massive oversight and easily fixed by companies like Valve, Adobe and Blizzard. Less than 10 lines of code could fix this problem.
- amock 16y ago
  It takes more than a few lines of code to make sure everything works. You now have to test on both kinds of filesystems which doubles the amount of testing you have to do.

daveGravell 16y ago

You could actually just create a separate partition to run those apps in. You can even just use a disk image http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050505184714699 http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200505051847146... You also may need to symlink some directories.