What I really like is a naming files with a forbidden windows character in Linux and they wont copy over to a windows partition. I end up using a question mark quite a bit for some reason.
Or just name the file
con. Windows 95 even used to bluescreen if you tried to refer tocon\con.touch 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32'
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
8.3, actually!
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
Oooh, I’ve had that with some device. I think it was a camera or something like that. I’d forgotten about it. It took me ages to figure it out.
Oh it’s even better, windows explorer can’t really do case sensitive
But NTFS is a case sensitive file system
This occasionally manifests in mind boggling problems
Yeah, it’s super weird. I once named a file with mixed case, but one of the letters was the wrong case. Renaming the file didn’t work at first. Renaming a file named PAscalCase.txt to PascalCase.txt resulted in no change to the filename. Windows continued to show it as PAscalCase.txt. I had to rename it to something totally different with different characters entirely, then rename it again to get it right.
And i hate it being case sensitive
Yeah, right? Are we pretending that having case sensitive file names isn’t a bad call, or…? There are literally no upsides to it. Is that the joke?
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.
I’m with you here, i find it infuriating and i never ever had the situation where this was beneficial.
Like who tf actually creates a File.txt, file.txt AND FILE.TXT in one place and actually differentiates them with that.
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.
This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.
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.
case insensitive by default, yet case preserving
This isn’t just a Windows thing… It’s the same on MacOS by default.
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 :)
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
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
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!
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.
