From: randall AT alum DOT mit DOT edu (Randall) Subject: Another vote on the case-sensitivity issue 10 Mar 1998 22:21:08 -0800 Message-ID: <199803102354.PAA00659.cygnus.gnu-win32@whitman.net> Reply-To: Randall To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com I see that there has been some traffic on this gnu-win32 list over the issue of case-sensitivity in the GnuWin32 utilities. As this seems to still be an open issue, let me put in my vote. For practical use of the GnuWin32 utilities, i need an option to tell them to consider filenames case-insensitive when handling wildcards. This is because many of my files are created by 16-bit programs that insist on storing NAME.EXT instead of name.ext; whereas conceptually I consider the name to be "name.ext" in either case. Actually, an environment variable would be better than a flag, so I wouldn't have to remember/type that flag every invocation. I recommend giving users both options. One note to this list said that 'ls *.[Tt][Xx][Tt]' should be sufficient, just like in UNIX. No, that is not acceptable in terms of ease-of-use considerations; if I have to do that i will likely stick with the old 8.3-limited 16-bit ls.exe. It is NOT just like UNIX for this reason: in UNIX no program ever gives me FILE.TXT when I run 'program file.txt'; whereas DOS apps do that to me all the time. This is a crucial difference. I saw the note on the FAQ web page about special globbing of e.g. "ls *.exe" when running under command.com [in "How does wildcarding (globbing) work?"]. Is this a change from b18 to b19? I don't see this behavior in b18 when running under command.com. In any case, my comments above are equally applicable when I am running under tcsh.exe as when I am running under command.com. Specifically, I am using the b18 version of the Cygnus GnuWin32 utilities under Dos-7.10/Win95-4.00.1111 on i586-166 when doing a task for which I need Dos/Win rather than Linux. =randall Btw, for those of you fortunate enough to have perl for Win32 installed (I gotta do that one of these days!), you might have use for an adaptation of the following perl script: #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w ## tolower.pl: Convert listed filenames to lowercase ## Copyright 1997-1998 Randall Whitman ## May be copied under terms of the GNU General Public License mkdir Tmp,777 or die "Tmp already exists."; chmod 0700, Tmp; foreach $file (@ARGV) { print $file, "\t", lc($file), "\n"; system "mv $file Tmp"; $outfile = lc($file); system "cp -p Tmp/$file $outfile"; } - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".