This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.
I don’t really see the benefit of allowing users to create files with the same name in the same directory, yeah, yeah I know that case sensitivity means that it isn’t same name, but imagine talking to a user, guiding them to open the file /tmp/doc/File and they open /tmp/doc/file instead
The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there’s no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn’t good for a system which needs to support the whole world.
In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn’t ASCII. It’s also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just ‘/’ and ‘\0’, I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.
Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we’d probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages
You’re basically arguing that a system shouldn’t support user friendly things because that would add significant burden to the programmer.
The quintessential linux philosophy. Well done! I mean, what is language? Why have named code variables? This is just a random array of bytes!
This isn’t “Windows design”… this is just inherited stone age bullshit from the DOS days when the filesystem was FAT16 and all file names were uppercase 8.3.
NTFS is case sensitive in its underlying design, but was made case insensitive by default, yet case preserving, for reasons of backwards compatibility.
If Microsoft has to design something from scratch, without the need for backwards compatibility, they go for case sensitive themselves. For example: Azure Blob Storage has case sensitive file names.
If you rename a file only changing the casing it doesn’t update properly, you need to rename it to something else and back.
This is so userfriendly I have been stumped by it multiple times.
On the other hand in using Linux I have had a number of problems with the casing of files: The number is 0
If you rename a file only changing the casing it doesn’t update properly, you need to rename it to something else and back. This is so userfriendly I have been stumped by it multiple times.
To my great surprise, this has been fixed. I don’t know when, but I tried it on my Windows 10 VM and it just worked. Only took them 20 years or so :)
macOS also does this by default, but you can change it (though you have to reformat the disk in question). This is generally fine for non-system disks if you REALLY need it for some reason, but afaik it is not recommended for the OS disk due to assumptions that macOS-targeted binaries make (similar to the windows regex version matching that caused problems for a while because it became the unofficial best way to check windows versions for app install compatibility). It’s doubly annoying on newer Apple systems because the integrated SSDs are WAY faster than pretty much anything else you can connect to it. But for the most part, I find it’s more of a nuisance to keep in mind than a real problem (I’ve been dealing with dev-issue MBPs since about 2012).
As in the windows case, this is also an appropriate choice for the average Apple user (though the fact that they’re fairly ubiquitous as dev machines in many places is annoying on several levels, despite the generally solid best-case performance and thermals I’ve observed).
Huh I had thought case-sensitive was default on APFS/HPFS and you had to choose insensitive specifically but I guess not
It’s neat that Linux has the ability to do this, but I honestly can’t think of a good usecase for this. I think this is more confusing than it is useful
Huh, what makes this a use case in favor of case sensitive file names? How does git use this feature?
Create multiple branches that only differ in cases from a Unix OS so it breaks git for Windows users in the same project.
I feel the same way about programming languages. There is no way that “User” and “user” should refer to different variables. How many times has that screwed people up, especially in a weekly typed language?
One of the many things that I feel modern versions of Pascal got right.
Nope. Completely different.
Case is often used to distinguish scope. Lowercase is local while uppercase is public. “Name = name” is a pretty standard convention, especially in constructors.
There is a ubiquitous use case in programming. There is not in the file system.
This is the first time I’ve seen uppercase denoting scope. Usually it is done with a “_” or “__” prefix.
Casing styles usually mean different identifier types.
snake_case or pascalCase for functions and variables, CamelCase for types, UPPER_SNAKE_CASE for constants, and so on.
If we want to apply this to file systems, you could argue something like: CamelCase for directories, snake_case for files, pascalCase for symlinks, UPPER_SNAKE_CASE for hidden files.
It’s quite useful for stuff like PROGRAM and Program in the same directory where PROGRAM is the program itself and Program is some unrelated files about the program. Bad example, but the case stands.
So what you’re telling me is that it’s useful when the software you use is made by absolute idiots?
It’s not about software. Program, PROGRAM were just placeholders for content. I know you can think more abstract and argue in better faith than this.
Windows and NTFS support case sensitive filenames. The functionality is disabled for compatibility reasons.
I remember the good old days of Windows MS-DOS where they had an 8 character filename limit lol
What happens if i put case sensitive files into an ntfs pendrive and plugged into windows?
Can it rename it then? What happens if cd into a folder from cmd with same name?
And you can enable it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivity
I can make a file named COM1 on Linux. That’s on the forbidden list for Windows.
The forbidden list:
- CON
- PRN
- AUX
- CLOCK$
- NUL
- COM1
- COM2
- COM3
- COM4
- COM5
- COM6
- COM7
- COM8
- COM9
- LPT1
- LPT2
- LPT3
- LPT4
- LPT5
- LPT6
- LPT7
- LPT8
- LPT9
The thing is, a lot of the legacy backwards compatible stuff that’s in Linux is because a lot of things in Unix were actually pretty well thought out from the get go, unlike many of the ugly hacks that went into MSDOS and later Windows and overstayed their welcome.
Things like: long case sensitive file names from the beginning instead of forced uppercase 8.3 , a hierarchical filesystem instead of drive letters, “everything is a file” concept, a notion of multiple users and permissions, pre-emptive multitasking, proper virtual memory management instead of a “640k is enough” + XMS + EMS, and so on.
LPT1 LPT2 LPT3 LPT4 LPT5 LPT6 LPT7 LPT8 LPT9
Why does Microsoft hate Life Pro Top listicles?
But why though? Do you really want a bunch of file.txt File.txt FILE.txt fIle.txt FiLe.txt FIle.txt flIe.txt… I once had a nasty bug the O in a file name was a 0 and I didn’t notice I can’t imagine the horrors this would cause.
Yeah I’ve definitely run into issues where case sensitivity causes problems. Especially in programs that are cross-functional between Windows and Linux. Like when I recently downloaded some bios files for a Playstation emulator and I spend time figuring out and troubleshooting why they weren’t working until it finally hit me the door McFly it’s cause the file name was in lowercase not uppercase. Than I cared to admit to figure out
