Case sensitive file names

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: seismo!mnetor!spectrix!clewis (Chris Lewis)
Date: Wed Oct  8 11:00:33 1986
Organization: Spectrix Microsystems Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Mod,

I'll leave this to your judgement whether to post this or not...
[ Judgement?  Who, me?  -mod ]

I'd rather everybody be very careful about making global statements like
"all other systems are case insensitive".  Many of the examples given
so far, eg: CP/M, VM/CMS *are* case sensitive.   When dealing with these 
O/S's right down at the "system call level" (if you could call it that), 
they *do* respect case.  The upper-casing is done in the command 
interpreters (CCP, EXEC1, EXEC2, optionally in REX), and in the utilities.  
[Most of the time it's damn difficult to get lower case into a VM/CMS 
system in any way].  [That comment was not by the moderator -mod]
However, down deep (eg: CP/M BDOS, VM/CMS FSOPEN/FSREAD) 
these systems will create files with mixed case and respect case in file 
name searches.  One of my CP/M floppies still has a lower case named 
file on it because Microsoft basic isn't smart enough to upper case 
file names, and I haven't gotten around to writing the assembler code 
to delete it.  One of the favorite CCP hacks is to zap the upper-case
command line code.

Yes, there are some systems that are truly case insensitive - Honeywell
GCOS comes to mind - it keeps its file names in BCD!

Further, I wonder whether any sort of conformance would help - every
system differs so much from each other, that case [in]sensitivity is
a very minor part.  Eg: 18 character 3 blank separated part file names 
in CMS (gack ptui!) etc., etc., etc....  When writing an emulator you'll
almost always have to write your own filesystem handler anyways, with
specific escapes for "native mode" files.

Mind you, it would be nice to have file transfer utilities (eg: tar)
warn you that the file names you are putting on your tape may not be
unique/representable on a non-UNIX target.  Eg: warn when two files
on the tape differ only in case and when two files have the same name
within the first 8 chars.

Chris Lewis
UUCP: {utzoo|utcs|yetti|genat|seismo}!mnetor!spectrix!clewis
Phone: (416)-474-1955

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 38