TIL case insensitive filesystems are still a thing actually in use.
Why lol
Though I use a case-insensitive filesystem (APFS), I name all files lowercase with underscores and no spaces. Dates get hyphens. Example for purchase receipt to a show I’m about to attend: bloody_beetroots_2025-03-28.pdf
ISO 8601? A man of culture I see.
It’s the only sane dating system.
I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.
There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library:
GET,HEAD, andPOST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called
head.I think you see where I’m going with this.
HEADandheadare the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.Installing
/usr/bin/HEADfromlibwww-perlonto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote/usr/bin/headand broke various things.Case insensitive is more intuitive and MUCH safer.
You do not want every Windows user to live in a world where Office.exe, office.exe, Offlce.exe and 0fflce.exe are all different files.
OSs and filesystems aren’t built for programmers, they’re built for grandmas. Programmers just happen to use them. It’s much more sensible to give programmers a harder time fixing bugs and incompatibilities than it is to make the user experience even marginally worse.
I mean, all due respect for the guy, but that is an absolutely terrible opinion and I will die on this hill.
Your grandma will never type file names in shell, she’ll use Open File dialog, where case sensitivity does not matter.
What about case insensitive programming languages?
Im a python programmer so I’m used to it, but my coworkers are SAS programmers that is case insensitive and they keep getting errors when trying to write python because of that.
Python is case insensitive? Or do mean that it’s not? The phrasing is a little confusing.
Python is case sensitive. I think they’re saying their coworkers are writing case insensitive code which is causing errors (perhaps writing
myFunctionand then calling it viamyfunctionwhich would result in an undefined error)
Damn straight. I thought bcachefs was a modern filesystem? Why is it case insensitive? Huge red flag.
It isn’t normally, but it, like e.g. Ext4, allows case insensitivity mostly for the sake of Wine.
But Wine could handle the case insensitivity though? NTFS is case sensitive.
It does, but having case insensitivity in the file system can get you better performance.
How would that happen?
If you’re running Wine on a case-sensitive file system, and you it tries to open a file, it would first try to open a file whose case matches exactly. But if it doesn’t find one, it would then need to list all the files in the directory, normalize their case, and go through them all to see if there is a file with the given name but in a different case. That can take some time if there is a lot of files in the directory.
But if you’re on a case-insensitive filesystem, the FS can keep case-normalized names of all files on disk, so you can do a case-insensitive open just as fast as you can do a case-sensitive open.
BTW, another application that can benefit from this is Samba, since SMB is case-insensitive.
That –at best– gives you the same performance.
EDIT: Ok, I misunderstood – you meant the performance of “case insensitive in kernel” vs. “case insensitive in userspace”. I get your point now.
Isn’t bcache the one made by the solo dev who was causing all that drama trying to merge a bunch of crap during a freeze last year?
If so that explains quite a bit lmao
What the hell phoronix, why are you using that cookie vendor that will sell your data to 46396 parties and no worries, you can stop it by deselecting each one of them! You can either accept or spend the day disabling this shit.
If that’s how it’s going to be, phoronix is done for me, sorry. I’d love to support your work even, but not with this
Yeah, I tried disabling my ad blocker to support them, but the page does not show ads even then and complains as if it were still active, and I think it is because I left Privacy Badger on. There is no way I am turning that off, so too bad for them!
Heck, I would even consider subscribing, but it looks like one first needs to create a forum account before one can even see the subscription price‽ What a very weird site…
Good for him. I hate case-sensitivity, and it’s what keeps me going back to DOS & Windows. FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing at all times.
FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing
If these were truly the same thing, you should have not written them differently.
But you did.
you should have not written them differently.
But you did.
Remember that 99% of the time that’s gonna be because of a typo for 99% users. They won’t have
File.txt,FILE.TXTandFiLe.tXt, they’ll haveReportMay.docxandREportMay.docxor whatever.And yeah, that includes me. I don’t want case-sensitivity for that reason alone. Thanks, but no thanks.
I prefer computers do what I tell them to rather than what it thinks I meant to tell it to. If I screw up, why isn’t it on me to fix it? And why aren’t you proofing data entry before accepting it?
Was this really supposed to be a clever point?
it’s not “supposed”. It just is.
