Should "B" be the Same as "b"?

joshua42 asks: "Although having used Linux and FreeBSD for many years, I have yet to come across anyone seriously questioning the traditional UNIX style file system name paradigm. With an Amiga background (It should be the same for people growing up with Windows, or those growing up with no computer at all (God forbid!).) it took me quite a while to get used to 'A' and 'a' being treated as different characters. This is of course fairly easy to accept and to understand if you have a technical background. I do however have a hard time to see how aunt Ginny will ever be able to distinguish between her 'Letter.txt', 'LETTER.TXT' and 'letter.txt' files. In real life, upper and lower case letters represents almost identical information to most people. Has any thoughts been spent on this issue, now that our favorite OS is becoming increasingly mainstream? Does it need to be addressed? Have any attempts been done? What are the implications to parts outside the file systems?" This is an interesting point. As Unix grows more and more popular, the simple things we've taken for granted about the filesystem may stand in the way of general users adopting it. What ways can you think of that will mitigate this problem for new Linux users without actually affecting too much? Special shells for novice users, that can simplify much of the complexity may be the way to go, here.

Comments

Re:Apple....

[medcalf]

Actually, OS X per se is not this way. The HFS+ filesystem used by OS X is this way. Using UFS on OS X (built-in and easily used if you want to) uses a case-sensitive, rather than simply case-preserving, filesystem.)

In the meantime...

[dar]

For bash users: Add the following to the .inputrc in your home dir.

set completion-ignore-case on

Then when hitting tab to complete a filename, it will fix the case for you. i.e. typing "vi xf8" and pressing tab will get you "vi XF86Config" etc.