file name case sensitivity

[Shankar Unni]

Gerald S. Williams wrote:

> As you may have guessed, I've been working on this problem
> recently. I just put a request into SourceForge to create
> a new project: a library I've been calling CaseWise. It's
> only for Windows NT/2000/XP since it uses the Native API,
> but I'm hoping to get Cygwin to use it eventually. The
> library provides direct replacements for Windows API calls
> (e.g., CaseWiseCreateDirectory replaces CreateDirectory),
> with both ANSI and Unicode versions. I plan to allow calls
> to fall back to the original functions on platforms that
> don't support CaseWise semantics.

Very interesting. Once you do create such files (different case but same 
case-insensitive value, or files called "aux.something" or 
"prn.something"), will regular Windows programs be able to even look at 
that directory? Or will they choke on those names (e.g. hang when 
listing the directory, or when opening the file)?

I'd be wary of creating directory contents that can only be handled by 
special tools. Hopefully once you create these "weird" files, they will 
at least be gracefully handled by regular Windows tools, even if it 
means just something like a "cannot open file" message.



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