Remember: GNU/Linux and other UNIX systems can make files that are case-sensitive, Windows can't make files that are case-sensitive

This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.

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

Windows and NTFS support case sensitive filenames. The functionality is disabled for compatibility reasons.

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

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.

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

And i hate it being case sensitive

thank god it's not case sensitive holy shit. i don't understand the kind of person who would see that as a positive.

Even more annoying is that it's very cumbersome to change the case of a file once you've created it.

If you accidentally create fIle.txt when you meant File.txt, the rename function does nothing ... and it will keep displaying as fIle.txt. You have to rename it to something else entirely, then rename it back to the original name with the intended case.

To screw with Windows users, you should sometimes put a README.md as well as a README.MD in your git repos. It leads to interesting results.

Is it just me or is that more of a hinderance?

Yeah I've been using Linux for a very long time. The amount of time I've spent on the case being incorrect is non-trivial. I've gotten better at not screwing it up throughout the years but the sum of advantages is far outweighed by the sum of debugging time spent.

cd downloads

bash: cd: downloads: No such file or directory

cd Downloads

user@pcname:~/Downloads$

I'm with windows on this one. Case insensitive is much more ergonomics with the only sacrifice represented by this meme. And a little bit of performance of course. But the ergonomics are worth it imo.

Windows way is superior, in my opinion. I don't think there's a need for File.txt and fILE.txt

I find it really fucking irritating on Linux tbh. It knew what file I meant.

The main problem with case-insensitive is that software sometimes is lazily developed: If a file is named “File.txt” and a program opens “file.txt”, then on a case-insensitive file system it will work fine. If you then format your drive to case-sensitive, the same software now fails to load the file. Source: tried case-sensitive filesystem on macOS some years ago.

The android build system used that limitation of Windows to prevent android from being built on Windows. They purposely had directories with the same name but different capitalization.

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it's just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That's not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven't tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you're going to do do all of them. (But then, they're idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

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.

Strictly speaking, this is a limitation of the default filesystem, and not the core operating system. If you mount a NFS share that is case sensitive, it will still be case sensitive.

The meme faces are backwards on this one.

Fun things happen whenever you upload 2 files with the same names, but differently capitalized letters to a Nas from a linux box, and then try to delete one of them from windows. It broke so hard I actually got a bsod....

This puts the win in Windows

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.

Case sensitivity is how we get SovCits…..

I prefer case sensitive but I guess that's just me

This makes installing Skyrim mods harder because mods often contain differing versions of folder names. For example one mod might be "Scripts" and the other might be "scripts". This means you can't have Skyrim mods on Linux if you're allergic to copying files manually as this will generally make mod managers not work as well. People on forums like nexus often have a hard time even grasping the concept of not using a mod manager so it's hard to get help of any kind.

oh for fucks sake, don't make me have to worry about the case of filenames.

you can also use basically anything that's not / in a file name as well, it's pretty based. Meanwhile on windows you have to use SMB mappings if you don't want your directory structure to self immolate, what a good operating system.

To my knowledge since Windows 10, files can be case sensitive. It is still tricky to setup, but it won't break.

Thought experiment: Would you expect a programming language variable name to be case insensitive?

That is, if you set foo = 1 and then print FOO, what should happen? Most programming languages throw an error.

Is this even comparable with filenames, which are, after all, basically variable names that hold large quantities of data?

If there is a difference, is it the fact it's a file, or - for a mad idea - should files with only a few bytes of data retain case insensitivity? And if that idea is followed through, where's the cutoff? 256 bytes? 7?

(Anyway, Windows filenames are case sensitive, in a sense. If you save "Letter to Grandma.txt" it will retain those two capital letters and all the lower case letters exactly as they are. It won't suddenly change to "LETTER to Grandma.txt", despite the fact that if you try to open a file by that name, you'll get the same file.)

file.txt
file.TXT
file.tXt
etc

You can make windows care about file case sensitivity. We enable it at work to ensure sanity with our local git repo's. https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/how-to-make-windows-folders-case-sensitive

I sometimes run into this when I extract an archive file on Windows and there are files named with different cases but are otherwise the same. I prefer case-sensitivity because I like precision and fewer assumptions being made about a system and how it's used.

IIRC MySql inherits that behaviour when running on windows (or at least older versions do)

That was a real fun time when switching OS

That would be awful for CAD software since they often display part names, which are derived from the file name only in uppercase letters for readability. But Linux doesn't really have any industry standard CAD software anyway.

You can’t even clone the Linux kernel on windows because of filenames

HEY, NOT ALL OF US CAN AFFORD LOWER-CASE LETTERS

Does this also work in Linux or just GNU/Linux?

Chadman would never say brrrrrrr

GNU’s Not Unix

I wanna "make a both filename"!

I throw that at every party for years now and they still don't get it.

But not a dir tmp and a file tmp, tmp already exists.

MacOS: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NojhoqDNuOU

you mean ntfs and fat are, not windows itself. if windows supported ext4, it wouldn't have case sensitivity on an ext4 drive

Remember: GNU/Linux

I stopped there. Enough kowtowing to the toejamophage.