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:Well, it's not like the OS chooses case for you

[Dephex Twin]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Aunt Ginnie have to actually hold the Shift key, or press Caps Lock, in order to get anything beyond "letter.txt"? Therefore, can't it be assumed in the case of Letter.txt that she did it on purpose? Sure, I'll agree that the case of LETTER.TXT is probably a user who put capslock on and forgot about it. But why deny her the ability to express herself the way she intended, if that's what she intended?

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.

My solution is for the OS to ignore the caps lock key. Not only would it solve the case problem, but it would shut up a whole lot of AOL users.

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.
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