4 ms·

yeah, or it can be sensitive. It's got various options that you can tweak depending on needs.

• silentbicycle 15y ago
  I didn't know that. (Some info here: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031027224603111 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2003102722460311...) I still think it's a terrible default, though. I'm coming to OSX from BSD and using it as a Unix. Retrofitting case-insensitivity onto a Unix is bound to lead to ugly corner cases.
  • masklinn 15y ago
    > Retrofitting case-insensitivity onto a Unix is bound to lead to ugly corner cases. It generally works well, but the other way around does not work: many OSX software (most prominently — as usual — adobe's) play fast and lose with casing, and will break down on case-sensitive HFS+.
    • gthank 15y ago
      I'm pretty sure it hoses Norton's "security" software, too. Of course, if you can't handle documented file system options, I don't trust you to detect exploits….
    • __david__ 15y ago
      Yeah, you don't even want to know what I had to do to get around Steam not handling case sensitive filesystems. Steam is the only thing I've noticed that doesn't work right. There was also one driver that installed itself into "/LIBRARY/EXTENSIONS/". That was annoying but easy to fix.
  • glhaynes 15y ago
    The vast majority of their users aren't using it "as a Unix" and most of those who are don't mind case-insensitivity or know to use case-sensitivity when it's needed.
  • varikin 15y ago
    I have been bitten by that a couple times now. I develop on a mac, but deploy on Linux and had a couple cases of trying to import or open a file that couldn't be found due to a case issue. And it is next to impossible to rename the file on a Mac from SomeFile.txt to somefile.txt. I think I had to do SomeFile.txt -> someotherfile.txt, commit -> somefile.txt, commit.
  • nknight 15y ago
    Unix's case sensitivity has long been a source of minor but obvious annoyance to non-technical users, to whom a name is a name -- the case of the letters is irrelevant. On top of which, it would have been an added complication for developers porting from Classic, and an unexpected change for users, in exchange for no substantive benefit. In truth, the only time HFS+'s case-insensitivity has bitten me was extracting an SDK from Broadcom, and even then, the SDK wasn't about to run on OS X anyway (it's entirely Linux-based), I was just pulling out some documentation.
    • politician 15y ago
      > annoyance to non-technical users Indeed, I've had to make password systems case-insensitive for similar reasons.
• ben1040 15y ago
  On the other hand I recently wiped and rebult my laptop with Lion and case sensitive HFS+, only to find that Adobe Creative Suite explicitly refuses to install on case sensitive volumes. Incredibly annpying.
  • lobster_johnson 15y ago
    It also breaks Steam. I'm sure it breaks a lot of other (badly-written, I should add) apps. I definitely recommend against using case-sensitive HFS+. It's a pain to fix because you have to reformat, and you can't restore from a Time Machine backup because Time Machine requires that the source and target file systems are case-compatible. :-/