Re: Upper/lower case filenames.

["Jonadab the Unsightly One" <jonadab at bright dot net>]

# Having just tried Cygwin, I notice that 8.3 filenames which are taken to
# be lower case under Linux are taken as upper case under Cygwin. 

8.3 filenames on FAT filesystems don't *have* case.  They are
case insensitive.  If you want case-sensitive filenames on a 
FAT fs, you have to use LFNs (vfat).  (Even then, relying on 
case on a FAT fs is risky if Windows has access to the 
filesystem; the case may be changed, usually to Mixedcase.)

It is traditional in DOS culture to represent filenames 
and parts of filenames in ALLCAPS in documentation to 
distinguish them from surrounding text.  DIR also represents
them this way.  However, the filenames themselves are not 
even case-preserving, let alone case-sensitive.  

# means that scripts such as "cp *.cpp ..." and makefiles don't work
# unless edited. Is there any reason for this design choice?

Ick, that seems very bad.  Is this really true?  OTOH, it
would be just as bad if uppercase didn't work.  Perhaps
such lossage is an unavoidable consequence of shells being 
designed to deal only with case-sensitive filesystems?  Is 
bash really that narrow-minded?  

-- jonadab

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