Case sensitive file names

Moderator, John Quarterman std-unix at ut-sally.UUCP
Thu Oct 9 10:28:55 AEST 1986


From: seismo!hpscda!hpdsd!hpda!hpisoa1!davel (Dave Lennert)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 86 15:24:20 pdt

Perhaps a good approach might be to require POSIX applications to specify
filenames to the system as all lowercase in order to be truly portable.
As long as the filenames don't contain *mixed* case then case shifting to
all lower or all uppper (or leaving case insensitive) on the part of the
system won't result in name collisions.

A variant on this is to require all hardcoded filenames in applications
to be lowercase, but filenames supplied by a user could be passed to the
system unshifted by the application.  The user should know the case
limitations of the underlying system.

However, my preference is to have the POSIX interface support cases
sensitive filenames.  I agree with others that this will not be hard
to implement given some of the other things that will have to be
provided.

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 39



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