Subject: Re: Q: Case sensitive file names (B17) -Reply
From: [email-masked] (Barry Roberts)

18 Dec 1996 10:31:58 -0800
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I haven't downloaded any source, or even gcc yet, but I would be
interested in getting some feedback on the difficulty of changing this.

Judging from the behavior, it seems as though pathname expansion uses
its own mechanism to determine if a file matches the wild card, not the
one built into Win32 (FindFirstFile with the wild card name as a
parameter).  If it's not difficult to switch to using the OS wild card
matching, then wouldn't this automatically give the correct behavior on a
FAT/NTFS/HPFS partition AND a drive mounted from a Unix box that is
case sensitive?  Any ideas?

>>> Richard Donkin <[email-masked]> 12/15/96 01:01pm
>>>
In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]>
> It seems that the cygnus file and shell utilities are case sensitive when
> performing wildcard expansion, and aren't for an explicit file name.
>  > For example, ls *.cpp will not show HELLO.CPP, but ls hello.cpp will
> show it (as lower case).

FWIW filename completion in bash is also case sensitive.   >  > For the
utilities I have tried (grep, ls, cat), this seems to be true  > whether
> run from cmd or bash.
>  > Is there a way that I can turn off this case sensitivity?  It makes
many of
> the utilities MUCH less useful on FAT/NTFS/HPFS partitions which
> preserve but ignore case.

I don't believe there is a way of doing this.  One workaround is to 
lowercase all files - I use a perl script that goes:

for $filename ( @ARGV ) {
    rename($filename, "\L$filename") or
        warn "lower: could not rename '$filename' - $!\n";
}

I realise this may not always be possible - IMO Cygwin should provide an
 option, probably as part of mount(1), to ensure that the readdir type
system  calls used for wildcarding / filename completion return
lower-cased  filenames, when used on a filesystem that is mounted with
the no-mixed  option.  Of course, all files on that filesystem would then
appear to be  lower case to ls etc.

Richard
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