Subject: Re: case sensitive directory names
From: [email-masked] (Earnie Boyd)

4 Dec 1997 07:12:09 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Content-Type: text/plain
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]

>From: Kevin Hughes <[email-masked]>
>To: "Gnuwin95 (E-mail)" <[email-masked]>
>Subject: case sensitive directory names
>Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 09:41:33 -0800
>
>I have a bad habit of using upper and lower case names in my directory 
names - not mixing them but having a directory called UPPERCASE rather 
than uppercase.
>
>This is no problem on Unix which copes as it handles upper and lower 
case for the names. NT does not - all files are essentially lower case. 
Fine I can cope with that but gnuwin appears to remember the name I 
typed and then uses that in the answer to pwd. Hence can do the 
following
>
>
>bash$ pwd
>/devel/kh/CC/SC
>bash$ cd  ..
>bash$ pwd
>/devel/kh/CC
>bash$ cd sc
>bash$ pwd
>/devel/kh/CC/sc
>
>Since I have scripts that check "where" I am in a directory structure 
before they will do anything this gets a bit tedious. I also have 
scripts which store away the answer to "pwd" and check it next time I 
try to do things. I
>
>Is there any real reason for this behaviour.? Can I turn it off and 
force lower case always? 
>

The real problem is that the underlying file system is case insensitive.  
When you cd, an environment variable is set that the pwd command reads 
and echos.  Because lowercase and LOWERCASE resolve to finding the 
directory then the environment variable will be set to what you keyed on 
the command line.

UNIX's file system on the otherhand is case sensitive.  So if lowercase 
exists and LOWERCASE doesn't then when you cd LOWERCASE you would get an 
error.

What problems is this nature causing?  From your examples I don't see a 
real problem as the directory names should be found in either case.  If 
it is something you really want you could modify the result from the pwd 
command to translate to lowercase.

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