[ILUG] bash Wierdness

[Ross Lynch]

Niall wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Sep 09, 1998 at 07:56:25PM +0100, Ross Lynch wrote:
> 
> > Here's the scenario, I wanted to quickly change the name of a file which
> > was in upper case to lower case. So, first of all I tried 'mv FILE.HTML
> > file.html' - alas, bash told me these were the same file. So, I then
> > tried 'mv FILE.HTML file.html1' and 'mv file.html1 file.html' followed
> > by 'rm FILE.HTML'. All had then disappeared! Why is bash acting as if it
> > wasn't case sensitive? These files are on a Windows partition should
> > that matter
> 
> Elementary rule of problem solving (apologies to Ken) - first check your
> hypothesis. You thought that being on a Windows partition might matter, so
> did you try the exercise on an ext2 partition ? If you had, you would have
> seen that the problem didn't exist on such a partition. The problem is
> indeed related to the files being on a Windows partition. Windows' VFAT
> filesystem is case preserving but case insensitive i.e. if you make a file
> called Fred, it will keep that name, but you won't be able to make another
> file called fred in the same directory, because the filesystem can't
> distinguish between a file called fred and one called Fred.
> 
> When playing with a Windows filesystem on which I have a directory called
> Games, I tried to  mv Games GAMES and got the error message
> 
> mv: cannot move Games' to a subdirectory of itself, GAMES/Games'
> 
> The joys of case preserving but insensitive filesystems. (Not a Windows
> exclusive - the MacOS' Finder does this too).
> 
> BTW the new versions of Bash (2.xx) do have some semantics which help in
> dealing with such filesystems. If the shell option  nocaseglob  is  enabled
> then Bash matches names in pathname expansion without regard to case. That,
> and the nullglob option, can hurt your head if you're not careful.
> 

Hmm, okay, thanks. I was almost sure I had done this before though.
Musta been ext2 I guess.

> Regards,
> 
> Niall  O Broin

-- 
Ross Lynch

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