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> All native Linux filesystems (except ext4) are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any s

> All native Linux filesystems (except ext4) are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any sensible rationale. Less than 0.01% of users in the Linux world depend on this feature. Lots of useful tidbits in this article, but I would disagree with the above. 1) The Unicode rules for converting lowercase to uppercase, then back to lowercase, are so convoluted, that normal developers or end-users cannot fully understand them. If I recall, the round-trip is impossible in some cases because information is lost in the conversion. 2) I have seen at least 2 occasions where one of my coworkers changed the case of a directory name on a MacOS (case-INsensitive as I discovered), pushed the changes to the remote server (GitLab or GitHub), which then proceeded to corrupt their git project badly. They had to blow away their local git repo and re-clone the project to recover. I never quite understood what happened, but I recall having to fix some stuff on my Linux box, which didn't have the case-folding problem. I think if a file name looks different (because of case), it should be treated as being different. But I'm probably in the minority.

advael 4y ago
Strongly agree. The way the roman alphabet is represented on digital computers is to treat upper- and lowercase letters as completely separate sets of characters. People are pretty used to treating these sets of letters as functionally equivalent across "cases", so there's an argument to be made that this is a weird and unnatural choice. Maybe it would have been better to treat the "case" of a letter like we treat fonts, as information separate from the plain text that's only ever used in rich text display. But since this representational convention is settled across every platform, it is a much weirder and more confusing choice to then treat these characters as equivalent when naming files, and causes more confusion than it clears up
BeefWellington 4y ago
What I especially love is the internationalization problem examples you can provide that relate to this. One simple example is what happens in case sensitivity if I have a file named "Große" and then try and open "GROSSE".
- olliej 4y ago
  On macOS they will be merged, similarly text find will match ss or ß. That said lossy case conversion is indeed a general problem, which is why the ease of case conversion in older text APIs cause problems - and indeed the general assumptions that there are cases, or whether or not the case is actually important. But then apps also continue to believe that one key press == one character, in the face of reality - not helped by the early browser english centric APIs: onkeypress, down, etc being the primary mode of handling text entry when not deferring to the browser. There are better web APIs nowadays, and hopefully things like the standard IMEs that English people use (emoji input on macOS, for example), mean that more devs actually think about these things, though in general everytime I encounter some site taking over text entry themselves I assume that they're broken for non-english or at least non-alphabet based languages.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Tangentially related, there are issues when making .iso's, depending on the ISO level used (this is independent from the OS), it is a capitalization issue that affects - besides german or other language characters - also more common ones in any languages, most notably the - (dash/minus) is capitalized as _ (underscore). JFYI: https://msfn.org/board/topic/182116-winsetupfromusb-problem-installing-xp-on-legacy-system/?tab=comments#comment-1191406 https://msfn.org/board/topic/182116-winsetupfromusb-problem-...
dylan-m 4y ago
It’s a dumb argument anyway because it’s misunderstanding who the “users” are that would be impacted by this type of thing. I cannot think of a workflow outside of programming where I would need to think about case sensitive filenames. If I’m an end user, I’m not programming, and I’m being forced to type accurate filenames into a box, either I’m doing it wrong or the software I’m using is an abomination. If I’m programming, on the other hand, I’d better bloody know how files work.
rvdginste 4y ago
> I think if a file name looks different (because of case), it should be treated as being different. But I'm probably in the minority. Completely agree. Also ext4 _is_ case sensitive on filenames. I think that _new_ users of a system should adapt to that system and not the other way around. Linux file systems have been case sensitive from the beginning. Changing that now would break things for users like me who are using linux for over 25 years.
merb 4y ago
btw. macos also has a case sensitive mode for their filesystem, it's just not the default.

advael 4y ago

Strongly agree. The way the roman alphabet is represented on digital computers is to treat upper- and lowercase letters as completely separate sets of characters. People are pretty used to treating these sets of letters as functionally equivalent across "cases", so there's an argument to be made that this is a weird and unnatural choice. Maybe it would have been better to treat the "case" of a letter like we treat fonts, as information separate from the plain text that's only ever used in rich text display. But since this representational convention is settled across every platform, it is a much weirder and more confusing choice to then treat these characters as equivalent when naming files, and causes more confusion than it clears up

BeefWellington 4y ago

What I especially love is the internationalization problem examples you can provide that relate to this. One simple example is what happens in case sensitivity if I have a file named "Große" and then try and open "GROSSE".

olliej 4y ago
On macOS they will be merged, similarly text find will match ss or ß. That said lossy case conversion is indeed a general problem, which is why the ease of case conversion in older text APIs cause problems - and indeed the general assumptions that there are cases, or whether or not the case is actually important. But then apps also continue to believe that one key press == one character, in the face of reality - not helped by the early browser english centric APIs: onkeypress, down, etc being the primary mode of handling text entry when not deferring to the browser. There are better web APIs nowadays, and hopefully things like the standard IMEs that English people use (emoji input on macOS, for example), mean that more devs actually think about these things, though in general everytime I encounter some site taking over text entry themselves I assume that they're broken for non-english or at least non-alphabet based languages.
jaclaz 4y ago
Tangentially related, there are issues when making .iso's, depending on the ISO level used (this is independent from the OS), it is a capitalization issue that affects - besides german or other language characters - also more common ones in any languages, most notably the - (dash/minus) is capitalized as _ (underscore). JFYI: https://msfn.org/board/topic/182116-winsetupfromusb-problem-installing-xp-on-legacy-system/?tab=comments#comment-1191406 https://msfn.org/board/topic/182116-winsetupfromusb-problem-...

dylan-m 4y ago

It’s a dumb argument anyway because it’s misunderstanding who the “users” are that would be impacted by this type of thing. I cannot think of a workflow outside of programming where I would need to think about case sensitive filenames. If I’m an end user, I’m not programming, and I’m being forced to type accurate filenames into a box, either I’m doing it wrong or the software I’m using is an abomination. If I’m programming, on the other hand, I’d better bloody know how files work.

rvdginste 4y ago

> I think if a file name looks different (because of case), it should be treated as being different. But I'm probably in the minority. Completely agree. Also ext4 _is_ case sensitive on filenames. I think that _new_ users of a system should adapt to that system and not the other way around. Linux file systems have been case sensitive from the beginning. Changing that now would break things for users like me who are using linux for over 25 years.

merb 4y ago

btw. macos also has a case sensitive mode for their filesystem, it's just not the default.