NTFS absolutely supports case sensitivity but, presumably for consistency with FAT and FAT32 (Windows is all about backwards compatibility), and for the sake of Average-Joe-User who’s only interaction with the filesystem is opening Word and Excel docs, it doesn’t by default.
Were you talking about MacOS? It’s been a long time since I last had to use it but I assumed it was case sensitive because it’s Unix based. Uh maybe ignore me then!
Yeah. They have both case sensitive and case insensitive options when you format your drive. It used to default to case insensitive. I haven’t formatted my boot drive in a long time, so I can’t say what it defaults to today.
Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn’t make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).
And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren’t actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.
‘A’ != ‘a’, they are just as unequal as ‘a’ and ‘b’
Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers’ intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.
I’m with you, and not just from a “human” perspective. Also when writing small programs meant to be relatively lean/simple it can be a problem when the user expects it to find a particular file regardless of its case (will it be DOOM.WAD or doom.wad? Doom.wad? Doom.WAD? … guess it’ll have to be [Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd] and import some globbing library as extra dependency… that, or list the whole directory regardless its size and lower/upper every single filename until you find a matching one…)
Oh jeez, I hadn’t even thought about capitalisation in the file extension. That would be especially confusing if extensions are hidden- the user would be presented with two files that look exactly the same.
On Mac when I rename a folder from “FOO” to “foo” git sees them as the same folder so no change is committed. In JavaScript I import a file from “foo” so locally that works. Commit my code and someone else pulls in my changes on their machine. But on their machine the folder is still “FOO” so importing from “foo” doesn’t work.
…and whoever decided a file system should be case insensitive by default, I hate you.
NTFS absolutely supports case sensitivity but, presumably for consistency with FAT and FAT32 (Windows is all about backwards compatibility), and for the sake of Average-Joe-User who’s only interaction with the filesystem is opening Word and Excel docs, it doesn’t by default.
All that said, it can be set on a per-directory basis: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivity
What’s a windows?
Were you talking about MacOS? It’s been a long time since I last had to use it but I assumed it was case sensitive because it’s Unix based. Uh maybe ignore me then!
Yeah. They have both case sensitive and case insensitive options when you format your drive. It used to default to case insensitive. I haven’t formatted my boot drive in a long time, so I can’t say what it defaults to today.
What’s the use case for case sensitive file names
Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn’t make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).
And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren’t actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.
‘A’ != ‘a’, they are just as unequal as ‘a’ and ‘b’
Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers’ intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.
Case insensitive handling protects end-users from doing “bad” things and confusion.
Like windows and their forbidden folder names
Simple solution: only allow lower case characters in file names.
Me working on a case insensitive DB collation 🤡🚀🐱🏍
If I have four files, a.txt, A.txt, b.txt, and B.txt, in what order do they appear when I sort alphabetically?
edit: I don’t understand why this was downvoted?
a, A, b, B?
A computer will spit out A, B, a, b
See also: ASCII chart
So if someone tells me to look for a file amongst a long list, I need to look in two different areas- the uppercase and lowercase areas.
I get why it’s more technically correct to differentiate, but from the perspective of a human user, it’s a pain in the ass.
I’m with you, and not just from a “human” perspective. Also when writing small programs meant to be relatively lean/simple it can be a problem when the user expects it to find a particular file regardless of its case (will it be
DOOM.WADordoom.wad?Doom.wad?Doom.WAD? … guess it’ll have to be[Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd]and import some globbing library as extra dependency… that, or list the whole directory regardless its size andlower/upperevery single filename until you find a matching one…)Oh jeez, I hadn’t even thought about capitalisation in the file extension. That would be especially confusing if extensions are hidden- the user would be presented with two files that look exactly the same.
Why would you order lowercase before uppercase?
Ascending order implies going from low to high
I guess the problem is that they were thinking First to Last when putting it in this order. Kind of like the image here:
On Mac when I rename a folder from “FOO” to “foo” git sees them as the same folder so no change is committed. In JavaScript I import a file from “foo” so locally that works. Commit my code and someone else pulls in my changes on their machine. But on their machine the folder is still “FOO” so importing from “foo” doesn’t work.
Because I want to?
Suffering