Re: File Name Case Sensitivity & Globbing! Was: file system name case insensitivity issue: Possible inclusion for the FAQ or User Manual?

[Edward McGuire <cygwin.com@metaed.com>]

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 12:38, Thorsten Kampe
<thorsten@thorstenkampe.de> wrote:
> This has nothing to do with Cygwin. You are (still[1]) confusing
> Cygwin and your shell. You would hugely benefit from gaining some
> basic knowledge about the tools you've been using since 1979.
>
> Your transcript was done in a shell called "bash". Globbing in
> bash is - by default - case sensitive. If you want to change that,
> read the man page and then set option "nocaseglob" ("shopt -s
> nocaseglob").

The globbing is not where the confusion lies. This globbing:

$ ls xwin*
ls: cannot access xwin*: No such file or directory

works as expected and did not confuse anybody. Here's what confused
the OP:

$ ls xwin
xwin
$ ls xwIN
xwIN

This is unquestionably a normal, Cygwin specific condition, caused
by the semantics of the underlying NTFS, but very confusing to
someone whose experience is with UNIX.

This note:

http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-casesensitive

warns that you cannot have two filenames in the same directory that
differ only by case, because of NTFS semantics.

It could be improved to warn that because of NTFS semantics there
are also filenames which exist but which Cygwin's readdir() does not
return, and which therefore are truly hidden -- will never show up
in directory listings or globs.

I think this is what the OP was volunteering to do.

Cheers,

MetaEd

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