Moving devices from 98SE to XP and back again

[<fergus at bonhard dot uklinux dot net>]

This is a file-handling problem that I have noticed in other contexts too.

Windows 98/SE is good (faultless?) at preserving upper case and lower case
in filenames, whether long or short or with spaces. However, I have noticed
when moving devices back and forth between 98 and XP machines, that XP is
nothing like as careful, and that in circumstances that I have not yet
precisely identified, one can suddenly lose this distinction when all 8.3
filenames that had been all lower case become all upper case.

Mixtures of case in filenames are preserved (libW11.dll stays libW11.dll,
XWin.exe stays XWin.exe) and so are long file names (cygcrypto.dll stays
cygcrypto.dll) but in all other cases (less.exe, cygwin1.dll) the change
takes place (LESS.EXE, CYGWIN1.DLL).

In an important respect this does not matter at all: Windows is daft enough
not to know there is a difference and so it does not notice it when seeking
and reading a file. Eg when starting Cygwin it does not matter that
cygwin1.dll has become CYGWIN1.DLL. But: Cygwin does notice, and once there,
ls cyg* presents a quite different response to ls CYG* (for instance). So
this is a very nasty occurrence, once it has happened.

I appreciate that the list is well populated with traffic on the subject of
long and short filenames but I have not found the answers to the following:
(1) when moving devices between different OS as described, is there a
particular class of activity that will cause this transformation? (Maybe
something to do with pursuing activities in a XP Command Prompt window, but
I can't confirm this.) (2) assuming the activity is a useful one to be
continued, is there some protection that can be implemented against the
transformation taking place?

Thank you.

Fergus


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