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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.
ok, you're probably right about the code size required. but what about how fast it executes? If someone asks for letters.txt, and it isnt found, it means checking for Letters.txt, and so on. Each iteration takes TIME. Worst case scenario is that letters.txt does not exist in any form of capitilization, and the end result is that the file is then not found.
As an example -- If Apache were to implement case-insensitive filenames, one could easily DoS a box by sending it LONG filenames (on the order of thousands of letters) that dont exist. The DoS comes into play because the httpd process spends a rediculous amount of time figuring out where a requested file is, only to return a 404 in the end. If someone were to take this and make a DDoS out of it, no one would be able to use the machine because of all the CPU time would be dedicated to resolving those bogus filenames. This would be where implementing it in the filesystem makes life much easier.
There are probably some faster algorithms, like seeing if any files start with "L" or "l", then second letter "E" or "e," but again, it adds unnecessary code to numerous apps.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Who is stopping her from expressing herself the way she intended? On my Mac, if I type "Letter.txt" or "lETTEr.TxT", it is preserved and displayed in this manner. But if I want to find this file and I look for "letter.txt", the computer isn't going to tell me there isn't any. Or if I try to name one file "letter.txt" and another "letter.TXT", it won't let me put them in the same directory. So while you can try to make the argument that "grannie should be able to express herself" (ignoring that she can still name the file how she wants), I don't see how 9999/10000 grannies getting confused by "letter.txt" and "Letter.txt" being considered different is the most important thing to preserve.
This would not help. I think you are talking about your own pet peeve about people writing in all caps in chats and emails. The subject at hand is the file system.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
You're snorting Coke, dude. What's the difference between 'Anything' and 'anything'? There is none. No one except Unix/Linux geeks expects there to be.