2d ago

Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems

www.phoronix.com

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114 comments

Good for him. I hate case-sensitivity, and it's what keeps me going back to DOS & Windows. FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing at all times.
- "FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing at all times." - Sentences from the utterly deranged.
  
  Linus agrees, from the article
  Dammit. Case sensitivity is a BUG. The fact that filesystem people still think it's a feature, I cannot understand.
- Why shouldn't I be able to have the files mare.png (a photo of a horse) and MarE.png (a photo taken on a vacation in March, fifth in the series after MarA, MarB, MarC, and MarD)?
  Or rainsley (a text file, no extension, with notes about a story I'm writing) and Rainsley (a directory with art of the same character the file is named after)?
  Do I strictly need to be able to do these things? No, of course not. But the file system is more flexible and functional if I am able to.
  
  Because humans don't actually work that way
  Also on user-oriented operating systems you can have spaces in file names without issue
- FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing
  If these were truly the same thing, you should have not written them differently.
  But you did.
  
  What an absolutely fucking obtuse troll comment. Go back to your bridge.
  
  Was this really supposed to be a clever point?
  
  it's not "supposed". It just is.
  
  It just is stupid. It only sounds like a clever retort if you don't think about it.
  
  you should have not written them differently.
  But you did.
  Remember that 99% of the time that's gonna be because of a typo for 99% users. They won't have File.txt, FILE.TXT and FiLe.tXt, they'll have ReportMay.docx and REportMay.docx or whatever.
  And yeah, that includes me. I don't want case-sensitivity for that reason alone. Thanks, but no thanks.
  
  I prefer computers do what I tell them to rather than what it thinks I meant to tell it to. If I screw up, why isn't it on me to fix it? And why aren't you proofing data entry before accepting it?
  
  This is the first time in my entire life I've heard a human being refer to "naming a file" as "data entry" that requires "proofing". Are you secretly a machine?
  
  How is it not data, usually key data, no less? It requires a unique path/filename combination, has to be human readable, is entered by a user. Not traditionally what one would think of as data entry, but is data that is entered and referenced. And unless you only use the recent view for finding files, knowing that the name is entered as intended seems rather important.
  And perhaps I am also secretly a machine.
  
  Do you also turn off autocorrect? As for why I'm not proofreading my entries? I am. But typos happen. Try to put yourself into the shoes of the average office drone or consumer just using a PC as a tool. I'm pretty sure I've harped on this before, but most people aren't experts or enthusiasts, they just want a working computer that's as simple to use as possible. The benefits of a case sensitive-file system are far outweighed by how susceptible it is to user error.
  
  Do you actually have a case sensitive filesystem? Because in reality I don't even notice it when doing normal work. It seems like such a weird thing to be crying about.
  
  I've used Linux, yes. And I'm not "crying" I just find it annoying. Good grief.
  
  I did, because they're different ways of expressing the same meaning. They all mean (apologies for borrowing mathematical notation for linguistic applications) |file|. I don't care what the expression of a thing is, I care about meaning. And as a result, when I save a file and then search to recall it, it should not matter what case it's in - only for the meaning to match. The state of my shift or capslock should be totally immaterial.
  
  when I save a file and then search to recall it, it should not matter what case it’s in
  Whatever you use to search can just be case insensitive, which is how most file browsers work on Linux.
  
  Then why should it allow me to save different expressions of the same meaning ever? If it's going to let me search for it case-insensitive, just head the matter off at the pass and save it that way. Either that, or automatically create link files for every case permutation to the same folder as soon as the file exists.
- This is really a problem of human vs computer thinking.
  F and f are two different characters, encoded differently. Ergo, File and file are different by raw bytes.
  Some developers wish to make the interactions for the user more consistent and thus a case-insensitive filesystem is born. The problem is that this is such a low level place to make this decision.
  A filesystem, as in the kernel level interactions for files, should be case-sensitive in that every character is a unique series of bits. But there’s nothing stopping a higher level api from helping users out. It would be sensible to have a case-insensitive desktop environment.
  The low level functionality should remain intentional though.
- I was looking into this recently and I didn't know this but NTFS is actually designed by competent people and is fully case sensitive.
  For backwards of course Microsoft had to make the file APIs case insensitive, but the actual filesystem is case sensitive.
  Also, presumably because this is a real turn-off for developers there is actually an option in Windows to sort of make specific directories case sensitive. Wild right?
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivity
  
  Yeah, I think Windows actually handles it quite well, the actual filesystem has no notion of what the filenames are outside of basic "It's UTF-16", it's the OS filesystem layer that handles all the quirks.
  Because that's what people seem to dismiss, there's no one standard notion of case folding. It depends on the locale you're using, and that shouldn't be built into the FS itself. The classic one was the German "long S", where "SS" should be case folded with "ß", except they changed it in 2024 so now they shouldn't match ("ß" becomes "ẞ" now), good luck updating your FS to support rules like that.
  Now your shell? That's easy, you can just warn the user that a "matching" filename already exists and prompt them to change it, and you can vary those warnings based on the locale, and you can push out updates as easily as any other patch.
  
  Ah, one more reason for me to despise NTFS.
  
  Why? They did it right...
- FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing at all times.
  "Let's point many completely different combinations of characters at the same file"
  sentences dreamed up by the utterly deranged /hj /lh
- Couldn't agree more. I literally can not think of a single scenario where case sensitive file names would be anything but an annoyance.
- somehow you remInded me of the BIG-small archItecture.
  
  BlG-small?
  
  smig ball

114 comments