On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 04:21:50PM -0400, Jim Jewett wrote:
If I want my program (or a dict) to know that "CONFIG" and "config" are the same, then I also want it to know that "My Documents" is the same as "MYDOCU~1".*
Well, perhaps you do, but those not using Windows are unlikely to care about DOS short names. However, they may care about some other form of short name. E.g. on iso9660 file systems (CDs) long names are just truncated; if two truncated names clash, the second and subsequent file is given a three digit suffix: this-is-a-long-file THIS-IS-A-LONG-NAME My Documents get renamed to: THIS_IS_ THIS_000 MY_DOCUM although my Linux computer displays those names in lower case. The Rock Ridge and Joliet extensions can record the unmangled file names, but not all CDs use them. It is not the case that all case-insensitive file systems necessarily support DOS short names. There are file systems that don't support long names at all, there are case-insensitive file systems that preserve case, and those that don't. It's not even necessarily so that Windows is always case-insensitive: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929110 -- Steven