I’ve got this sticker on my laptop at work! And whenever the idiots the “engineers” my coworkers have a death wish don’t know how to read ask me to do something stupid I like to point to it and wait for them to see it
I mean, it's less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.
For example I might store blobs of data processed by my database in files that have the Base64 ID of the blob as the filename. If the filesystem was case insensitive, I’d be getting collisions.
Users probably don’t make such files, no. But 99% of files on a computer weren’t created by the user, but are part of some software, where it may matter.
And often software originally written for Linux or macOS and then ported to Windows ends up having problems due to this.
For files of casual users it might be of benefit. They don’t care about capitalization. For system files, I find it pretty weird to name them with random capitalization, and it’s actually pretty annoying. Only lower- (or upper-)case would be ok tho.
Well, camel case does help readability on file names. But I guess that's the point of case insensitive names, it doesn't matter. However you want to call them will work.
Nah, Windows still fucks it up. I was forced to use Windows 11 for a code generation tool from a chip vendor the other week and it screwed everything up by inserting references to a directory with different cases than how it was actually created.
That’s more likely to be the tool assuming it’s running on a case-insensitive filesystem than it is Windows breaking anything. If you mount networked storage running on a case-sensitive machine, that’s something that’s worked fine in Windows for a very long time.
The tool is making the assumption, but everything works on Windows. Windows obviously selectively enforces case sensitivity, surely for backwards compatibility, and this stone-age behavior masks the problem.
What a tragedy. Giving files slightly different names seems far more organized and logical than having several files with the same name and different capitalization. Really seems like a non-issue to me.
EDIT: I will never simp for Windows or Microsoft, I definitely think Linux is better in many ways. But my point still stands about this specific topic.
I’ve used Windows for a bit more than a decade, and I only found out its VFS is case-insensitive (by default) after I fully ditched the OS, when a bunch of Electron applications created directories with different cases - nothing ever broke because of it, save for a single Godot game.
Personally, I think case-insensitivity seldom makes sense, though I’m also aware that not everyone [knows how / is able] to properly operate a keyboard.
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
No, I’m arguing that the extra complexity is something to avoid because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.
Especially when you consider that the behaviour we have was established way before there even was a unicode standard which could have been applied, and when the alternative you want isn’t unambiguously better than what it does now.
“What is language” is a far more insightful question than you clearly intended, because our collective best answer to that question right now is the unicode standard, and even that’s not perfect. Making the very core of the filesystem have to deal with that is a can of worms which a competent engineer wouldn’t open without very good reason, and at best I’m seeing a weak and subjective reason here.
Well you’re just asking an economic question, are the costs worth the benefits?
I’d argue that linux will never be a good or user friendly operating system without case insensitive filenames.
That isn’t an opinion but could be verified through scientific study of how confused people act. You don’t even need computers, just ask someone to get the “something SomeTHing” from a labeled box in a cupboard. Presumably science would show that case insensitive naming of things is always less confusing when humans actually use the system.
The truth is that programmers enjoy writing code far more than reading code. And especially to open source developers “usability” is a dirty word. It’s not about the value of a thing, it’s about the beauty of how it is done.
because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.
Unicode case folding has been a solved problem for a long time. The Unicode standard has rules for which characters should be considered identical, and many libraries exist to handle it (you wouldn’t ever code this yourself).
In case it’s not obvious, I agree that I don’t see much of a point in case sensitivity in an OS outside of simply providing additional options for various uses, it absolutely would be confusing for end users having to interact with it in many ways.
Let’s say you have a software that generates randomly named files, having the ability to use both upper case and lower case means you can have more files with the same amount of characters, but that sounds horrible and it’s the only thing I can think of atm
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).
Just checked on my work box - if you go into Disk Utility and start the process to add a volume, the default selection is APFS, and there’s an option in the dropdown for for APFS (Case-sensitive)
Indeed. Linux audio also allows control characters like backspace to be part of a file name (though it is harder to make such file as you can’t just type the name). Which is just horrible.
I don’t think there’s a need for File.txt and fILE.txt
It’s not so much about that need. It’s about it being programmatically correct. f and F are not the same ASCII or UTF-8 character, so why would a file system treat them the same?
Having a direct char type to filename mapping, without unnecessary hocus pocus in between, is the simple and elegant solution.
It is not. It is designed for all purposes, automated processes and people alike. A filesystem is not just for grandma’s Word documents.
And even people’s names are case sensitive. My name has the format Aaa Bbb ccc Ddd. It is not the same as the person with the name Aaa Bbb Ccc Ddd, who also exists. So why shouldn’t file names be?
I would argue that elegance and being easy to program are virtues by themselves, because it makes code easy to understand and easy to maintain.
A one-to-one string to filename mapping is straightforward and elegant. It’s easy to understand (“a filename is a unique string of characters”), it makes file name comparisons easy (a bit level compare suffices) and as long as you consistently use the case that you intend, it doesn’t behave unexpectedly. It really is the way of the least surprise.
After all, case often does have meaning, so why shouldn’t it be treated as a meaningful part of a filename? For example: “French fries.jpg” could contain a picture of fries specifically made in France, whereas “french fries.jpg” could contain a picture of fries made anywhere. Or “November rain.mp3” could be the sound of rain falling in the month of November, whereas “November Rain.mp3” is a Guns N’ Roses song. All silly examples of course, but they’re merely to demonstrate that capitalization does have meaning, and so we should be able to express that canonically in filenames as well.
That’s some suckless level cope. What’s correct is the way that creates the least friction for the end users. Who really cares about some programming purity aspect?
Thanks, really constructive way of arguing your point…
Who really cares about some programming purity aspect?
People who create operating systems and file systems, or programs that interface with those should, because behind every computing aspect is still a physical reality of how that data is stored.
What’s correct is the way that creates the least friction for the end users
Treating different characters as different characters is objectively the most correct and predictable way. Case has meaning, both in natural language as well as in almost anything computer related, so users should be allowed to express case canonically in filenames as well. If you were never exposed to a case insensitive filesystem first, you would find case sensitive the most natural way. Give end users some credit, it’s really not rocket science to understand that f and F are not the same, most people handle this “mindblowing” concept just fine.
Also the reason Microsoft made NTFS case insensitive by default was not because of “user friction” but because of backwards compatibility with MSDOS FAT16 all upper case 8.3 file names. However, when they created a new file system for the cloud, Azure Blob Storage, guess what: they made it case sensitive.
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
We had a repo with some really weird (filename) case issues on Mac also. I could only fix it on my home Linux machine, by deleting all the affected files, committing that, then restoring them with all lowercase names. Only time I’ve dealt with that in 20 years but it can happen!
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.
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.
My point is not about how case is meant to be used my point is that it is very easy to make a mistake that is difficult to spot. I think it makes a lot more sense to the case insensitive, and force different names to be used.
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.
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