file name case sensitivity

[Shankar Unni]

Thorsten Kampe wrote:

> Yes, but in my opinion it could be of use to John Williams because he 
> wanted to "case sensitivity in filenames under Cygwin".

No, it won't work, because if you remember, he said that he had files 
with the same name but different case *in the same directory*.  This 
expressly can*not* be handled by any of the Windows filesystems, even NTFS.

The case:strict stuff is only there so that an attempt to open "Foo" as 
"fOo" will fail, and will help if those "similarly spelt" files are in 
different directories. But if they are in the same directory, that's not 
possible.

Anyway, even if if were theoretically possible to force NTFS to be 
case-sensitive (the underlying filesystem does have support for this, 
though Windows doesn't normally expose it), you're still stuck with 
other oddities of the Windows filesystem implementation, like the 
inability to have any file with a base name that is the same as any of 
their devices (i.e. no /usr/include/con.h or /my/src/aux.c).

So there's no way you can *really* pretend you're on a Linux or other 
POSIX system and get away with it for long..

uClinux will have to be patched for cygwin support. John: time to start 
your first set of "unofficial cygwin patches" for uClinux.

--
Shankar.



--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/