What Mac OS’s case-insensitive filenames teaches us

https://medium.com/@paulbjensen/what-mac-oss-case-insensitive-filenames-teaches-us-cd8feee7b0b3

by paulbjensen • 7 years ago

3 9 7 years ago

Ran into this issue with CI and git. Was so difficult to track down. Now all Macs on my team are reformatted to be case sensitive because of this. Thankfully it's an option now.

minimaul• 7 years ago

It’s been an option since basically forever (I think you could use HFS+ case sensitive on Tiger, even).

But it breaks a large number of apps, so do it with caution.

rovr138• 7 years ago

And this is still an issue

I have had issues with this and instead of formatting, due to issues, what I ended up recommending was creating disk images, mounting them correctly and putting files there.

cygned• 7 years ago

Do case sensitive file systems still break Adobe software?

ikrtx• 7 years ago

This is written as if it was some kind of lesson on philosophy. Why were you even using uppercase letters in your file names to begin with?

paulbjensen• 7 years ago

I was applying a pattern of naming the files containing ORM Models with a capital, in order to represent that they contained a javascript class as their default export.

e.g.

    class Admin extends Model {
    };

    export default Admin;

mikl• 7 years ago

It’s not just macOS, Windows has the same, with all the same associated problems.

For that reason, I generally prefer to keep all file names consistently lower-case - user_account.ex over UserAccount.ex. It’s just as easy to read, if not more so.

We have enough other things to worry about as programmers without having to think about correct capitalisation of file names.

michalc• 7 years ago

I think it also teaches that Postel’s robustness principle isn’t always a good thing.

If the MacOS filesystem was not case-insensitive, i.e. it was _less_ liberal with what it accepted, the reported issue wouldn’t have happened.

latchkey• 7 years ago

The filesystem is case preserving.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1144082&seqN...

What Mac OS’s case-insensitive filenames teaches us

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