case sensitive file names

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: @SUMEX-AIM.ARPA:MRC at PANDA  (Mark Crispin)
Date: Mon 20 Oct 86 05:42:50-PDT
Postal-Address: 1802 Hackett Ave.; Mountain View, CA  94043-4431
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     The XDE Lisp machine file server I use has a file system of the
sort that Mark Horton describes.  That is, it accepts and preserves
mixed case in filenames, but in name selection it does a case-independent
match.

     I find that on this file server I am much more likely to use a file
name such as TokyoPaper.FirstDraft.  In fact, this file server encourages
me to mix case like this freely, since there is no cost in doing so.  I
can edit "tokyopaper.firstdraft" or "TOKYOPAPER.FIRSTDRAFT" or even
"tOKYOpAPER.fIRSTdRAFT" and the system is still smart enough to figure
out I mean TokyoPaper.FirstDraft.

     On the DEC-20 and Unix file servers, it's single case and hyphens.
I end up using something like "tokyo-paper.first-draft".

     These were personal observations.  However, I know for a fact that
nobody uses mixed case on our Unix-based file server.  The Leaf (Xerox
Lisp machine file access protocol) server on Unix was modified to coerce
all filenames to be entirely lowercase on the Unix machine's disk and to
coerce it back to all uppercase in the other direction.  There were/are
two reasons:
 (1) transfers to/from the third file server, a DEC-20, were hopeless
     otherwise since the Unix system would insist that two identical files
     were different because the case of the names didn't match
 (2) the users found the case dependence to be a serious problem.

-- Mark --
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Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 78