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An even earlier bug in Unix that considers "file.txt" and "FILE.TXT" two different files is still causing user anguish to this day. I mean, honestly, can any o

by 13of40 8y ago

An even earlier bug in Unix that considers "file.txt" and "FILE.TXT" two different files is still causing user anguish to this day. I mean, honestly, can any of you raise your hand and say that's made your life better?

userbinator 8y ago
Especially if you want to support Unicode the idea of "case-insensitive" becomes an absurdly complex mess, and I believe it's even lead to some security vulnerabilities (filename filtering, for example, now requires special Unicode-aware comparison.) It's good that it stays out of the filesystem.
paulddraper 8y ago
Raises hand. (1) My Buck BUILD file can exist alongside my build/ directory. (2) Outside of a 0x00 or 0x2F byte, I love not having to think about locales, character encodings, normalizations, etc. especially as I am sharing files across computers which may use different values for these. macOS went from case-insensitve to optionally case-sensitive for what I suspect are similar reasons.
- 13of40 8y ago
  Fair anecdote, but compare that to all of the untold millions of times someone's day has been derailed because they didn't push the shift key. It's a user interface, not an API.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    On the contrary, the file system is an application programming interface (hence its presence in every standard library and kernel). File explorers, etc. are user interfaces.
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    Does that really happen? Both CLI and GUI utils help find the correct file name (using Tab and by sorting, respectively). Can someone raise a hand if that happens to them?
    - hurrrrr 8y ago
      raises hand not with gui but with cli. Autocompletion stops early because 'SomeReallyLongSourceName.h' and 'SomereallyLongSourceName.cpp' are not the same after the fifth letter. It breaks globbing.
hexane360 8y ago
For me the asymmetry of case-insensitivity bugs me. Even if the filesystem is case insensitive, "touch file.txt" is different from "touch FILE.TXT". In the same vein, what should the case of the file be after "echo lowercase file > file.txt; echo uppercase file > FILE.TXT"? Case insensitivity would make sense to me if all files were stored and displayed as completely lowercase (although I'm not sure how this generalizes to other character sets).
Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago
World is full of these loopholes. On exFAT create file test and rename it to Test. ren test Test. Guess what, no error message, but the file remains named as test. You'll need to ren test test2 and then ren test2 Test and now works. File system and operating system bound together, with Linux you can put lot of stuff on NTFS volume, which just gets booted when you run chkdsk on Windows machine for first time.

by 13of40 8y ago

userbinator 8y ago

Especially if you want to support Unicode the idea of "case-insensitive" becomes an absurdly complex mess, and I believe it's even lead to some security vulnerabilities (filename filtering, for example, now requires special Unicode-aware comparison.) It's good that it stays out of the filesystem.

paulddraper 8y ago

Raises hand. (1) My Buck BUILD file can exist alongside my build/ directory. (2) Outside of a 0x00 or 0x2F byte, I love not having to think about locales, character encodings, normalizations, etc. especially as I am sharing files across computers which may use different values for these. macOS went from case-insensitve to optionally case-sensitive for what I suspect are similar reasons.

13of40 8y ago
Fair anecdote, but compare that to all of the untold millions of times someone's day has been derailed because they didn't push the shift key. It's a user interface, not an API.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  On the contrary, the file system is an application programming interface (hence its presence in every standard library and kernel). File explorers, etc. are user interfaces.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  Does that really happen? Both CLI and GUI utils help find the correct file name (using Tab and by sorting, respectively). Can someone raise a hand if that happens to them?
  - hurrrrr 8y ago
    raises hand not with gui but with cli. Autocompletion stops early because 'SomeReallyLongSourceName.h' and 'SomereallyLongSourceName.cpp' are not the same after the fifth letter. It breaks globbing.

hexane360 8y ago

For me the asymmetry of case-insensitivity bugs me. Even if the filesystem is case insensitive, "touch file.txt" is different from "touch FILE.TXT". In the same vein, what should the case of the file be after "echo lowercase file > file.txt; echo uppercase file > FILE.TXT"? Case insensitivity would make sense to me if all files were stored and displayed as completely lowercase (although I'm not sure how this generalizes to other character sets).

Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago

World is full of these loopholes. On exFAT create file test and rename it to Test. ren test Test. Guess what, no error message, but the file remains named as test. You'll need to ren test test2 and then ren test2 Test and now works. File system and operating system bound together, with Linux you can put lot of stuff on NTFS volume, which just gets booted when you run chkdsk on Windows machine for first time.