Date:	Sun, 24 Jan 1999 15:56:13 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender:	eliz AT is
To:	"Norman D. Megill" <ndm AT shore DOT net>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: djgpp loses characters when pasting to DOS
In-Reply-To:	<199901241139.GAA18224@northshore.shore.net>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.990124154845.25846A-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, Norman D. Megill wrote:

> > Windows doesn't care whether it's AS.EXE or as.exe or aS.eXe--all file 
> > operations are case insensitive.
> 
> Maybe standard Windows utilities, but the OS itself definitely does care -
> that mere fact that the it's displayed in upper case in one instance and
> in lower case in the other means the OS has internally distinguished them. 

You are confusing ``display'' and ``care''.

Indeed, Windows sometimes (but not always!) displays the file names as
they are recorded in the directory.  But it doesn't ``care'' about the
case, in the sense that the file will be found and operated upon no matter
what the case is. 

> It is applications that may or may not distinguish them, depending on how
> they are written.  E.g.: My gnu port of "ls" shows: 
> 
> D:\mm>ls *.M
> MLADEN.M  WOS.M
>
> D:\mm>ls *.m
> dan.m           e.m             miscellanous.m  mladen2.m

This isn't the DJGPP port of `ls', right?  Because the DJGPP port 
would have shown you all the *.m and *.M files in the second case (it 
assumes that since you didn't use the upper-case explicitly, you don't 
care about the case).  It would have also downcased these names in the 
second example (unless you explicitly tell it otherwise, by 
setting FNCASE=y in the environment).

> Indeed this inconsistent treatment drives me nuts.

DJGPP's internals work very hard indeed to try to hide at least some of 
these inconsistencies from you.  That is another reason to use as many 
DJGPP-compiled programs as you can.

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