import statement is case sensitive

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk qrczak at knm.org.pl
Thu Feb 22 11:32:01 EST 2001


Thu, 22 Feb 2001 02:58:29 GMT, Costas Menico <costas at meezon.com> pisze:

> Actually I would consider this a shortcoming of Unix. Shipping a
> product that depends on the directory names and files being in the
> right case must cause all sorts of headaches.

Not at all. I never caused me any trouble. Case of filenames doesn't
change by accident, as filenames themselves don't change. Why would
a directory be in a wrong case?!

The reality is that this is Windows which has problems with filenames.
Unix has very simple filename rules; Windows has very complicated
and poorly implemented rules. Sorry for repeating myself from 16 Feb,
but you asked for that:

For example when you try to create a directory called Spam, Windows
Explorer will create SPAM and display it as Spam. And when asked to
create SPAM, it will create it but display Spam. It behaves correctly
when the name has more than 8 characters or when a character outside
ASCII is used.

This is Win95 - I don't know if they fixed this in later versions.

Worse: using the Explorer you can create a filename with some non-ASCII
characters (e.g. <<French quotes>> or bullet), which will be silently
converted to other characters, perhaps different in long and short
names (in these cases: '<<' and '>>' character pairs, and '\7' -
a control character which displays as bullet in DOS). Details depend
on the default codepages (the above is for CP-1250 and CP-852). This
can make the file inaccessible under either Windows or DOS or both
(because the converted character is sometimes not legal in a filename,
but the filename was checked for correctness before conversion). You
can't delete or rename such file from either Windows or DOS or both,
until you repair the filesystem. Scandisk is not always able to do it.

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak at knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
 \__/
  ^^                      SYGNATURA ZASTĘPCZA
QRCZAK



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