Even more annoying is that it’s very cumbersome to change the case of a file once you’ve created it.
If you accidentally create
fIle.txtwhen you meantFile.txt, the rename function does nothing … and it will keep displaying asfIle.txt. You have to rename it to something else entirely, then rename it back to the original name with the intended case.mv old newIt actually seems like it even works in explorer nowadays. I’ll be damned, they fixed something…
What I really like is a naming files with a forbidden windows character in Linux and they wont copy over to a windows partition. I end up using a question mark quite a bit for some reason.
Or just name the file
con. Windows 95 even used to bluescreen if you tried to refer tocon\con.Sure there was mirc bug back in the day if you named yourself something like con or ps2 or any windows device name it would freeze that device on the windows machine.
touch 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32'
I find it really fucking irritating on Linux tbh. It knew what file I meant.
Yeah as someone who uses both this is really not much of a feature.
It’s a lack of a feature really. Case insensitivity takes way more work.
You can’t even clone the Linux kernel on windows because of filenames
This puts the win in Windows
you mean ntfs and fat are, not windows itself. if windows supported ext4, it wouldn’t have case sensitivity on an ext4 drive
i doubt it would let you run .com files, or any of the other various “special” characters though.
Though we don’t include whatever bullshit DOS compat might cause problems in either of these.
Isn’t there an application on Windows that allows you to open ext4? You check it out on that
yes but it’s not native in windows… then again fat and ntfs isn’t native to linux either.
Yeah, but we don’t know if we can do the case sensitive thingy on that, or do we?
I’d assume we can
GNU’s Not Unix
Strictly speaking, this is a limitation of the default filesystem, and not the core operating system. If you mount a NFS share that is case sensitive, it will still be case sensitive.
Technically not a limit there either since you in windows on NTFS can set a flag on a folder to make it case sensitive
fsutil.exe file queryCaseSensitiveInfo <path>Can you apply this recursively to an entire drive? Say…
C:\You could, but should pick a different drive than c (this will likely break a ton of stuff)
Brb adding this to my set of pranks for windows users
I’m with windows on this one. Case insensitive is much more ergonomics with the only sacrifice represented by this meme. And a little bit of performance of course. But the ergonomics are worth it imo.
so cool story, on linux theres this thing called you can just not make case sensitive files, i do it a lot.
You can also just, use a case insensitive autocomplete setup as well. If you’re using a mouse idk why you’re even talking about this so that wouldn’t matter.
You can, but assholes out there won’t.
hence the inclusion of the case insensitive auto completion, it’s not 1982, you can use that now.
If I have two folders in my directory,
Dir1anddir2, what doesd <TAB>autocomplete to and what should it do?At least on zsh it would pop both of those as suggestions you can cycle through.
Same in fish.
Also “zi” with a tui is an immense timesaver for changing directories.
In fish it would immediately expand to dir2.
If you have “Dir1” and “DIR2” and you type “cd d”, your prompt will look like in the next picture. Fish automatically transforms “d” into “D”, because there is no dir starting with the lowercase “d”.
On a subsequent <TAB> you’ll get a list of dirs matching your prompt so far in which you choose an entry with the cursor key and enter it with the enter key.
In the case of zsh it will quite happily do either and ask you which you meant just like if they were called Dir1 and Dir2. Also works if you have a dir1 and Dir2 in the same directory as well
When you say "canse insensitive file*, do you mean lowercase files? Or is there an option?
Idk why we talking about mouses. When I’m on Linux, most of the time it’s through ssh.
either or, whatever the fuck you want really.
You can just not use capital letters if you feel like it. Works pretty well. Or just use a case insensitive shell handler for pretending it’s not actually cased at all.
Hell im pretty sure you could just render all of the text in a certain case and call it a day lol.
I can make MY files all lowercase, but 99.999% of files on my computer are not created by me. And some of them have capital letters.
do you rent out your computer to other people? I think you’ll live tbh.
They are not created by people. They are created by programs.
what kind of programs are you using that use case in filenames. Smells like a skill issue to me.
I can make a file named COM1 on Linux. That’s on the forbidden list for Windows.
The forbidden list:
- CON
- PRN
- AUX
- CLOCK$
- NUL
- COM1
- COM2
- COM3
- COM4
- COM5
- COM6
- COM7
- COM8
- COM9
- LPT1
- LPT2
- LPT3
- LPT4
- LPT5
- LPT6
- LPT7
- LPT8
- LPT9
That’s because Windows is generally very backwards compatible.
So is Linux, but it puts stuff like that in /dev
The thing is, a lot of the legacy backwards compatible stuff that’s in Linux is because a lot of things in Unix were actually pretty well thought out from the get go, unlike many of the ugly hacks that went into MSDOS and later Windows and overstayed their welcome.
Things like: long case sensitive file names from the beginning instead of forced uppercase 8.3 , a hierarchical filesystem instead of drive letters, “everything is a file” concept, a notion of multiple users and permissions, pre-emptive multitasking, proper virtual memory management instead of a “640k is enough” + XMS + EMS, and so on.
Unix was designed for mainframes, qdos/msdos was designed to be a cpm knockoff the local nerd could use to play commander keen and do his taxes. It’s actually impressive how much modern/business functionality they were able to cram into that.
Unix was designed for mainframes
Unix was never for mainframes. It was for 16-bit minicomputers that sat below mainframes, but yes they were more advanced than the first personal computers.
It’s actually impressive how much modern/business functionality they were able to cram into that.
Absolutely, but you have to admit that it’s a less solid foundation to build a modern operating system on.
In the 80s, there were several Unices for PC too btw: AT&T, SCO, even Microsoft’s own Xenix. Most of them were prohibitively expensive though.
It still amazes me how well thought out unix was for the era when computing was in its infancy. But I guess that is what you get with computer science nerds from Universities and a budget for development based on making a product the goal, not quarterly profit the goal.
It’s what you get when you design an OS for a mainframe computer that is accessed by many users sharing its resources.
DOS was designed for single-user PC’s with very limited processing power, memory and storage, and no access to networked drives. Lots of its hacks and limitations saved a few hundred bytes of memory, which was crucial at the time.I guess i was meaning compared to DOS but modern Windows, where stupid stuff is broken, and they care more about ads than creating a clean OS
oh no, but com5 is one of my favorite words! literally unusable.
Windows users can’t even download PRN from the interwebz? Pathetic.
LPT1 LPT2 LPT3 LPT4 LPT5 LPT6 LPT7 LPT8 LPT9
Why does Microsoft hate Life Pro Top listicles?
You’re probably joking, but in case you don’t know: LPT stands for Line Printer Terminal, and LPT1, LPT2, LPT3… referred to parallel ports which were typically (though not exclusively) used to connect a printer.
you can also use basically anything that’s not / in a file name as well, it’s pretty based. Meanwhile on windows you have to use SMB mappings if you don’t want your directory structure to self immolate, what a good operating system.
I recently renamed a few movie files to something with ‘:’. That worked fine on Linux, but lead to some issues on windows. With a lot of errors from next cloud for file sync and me not being able to rename them without booting back to Linux. Fun stuff
if you’re using samba file sharing across OS’s (like you should) you should use something called catia:mappings in order to solve that problem. It means shit like colon will be mapped to a different character, but there are some sane mappings out there that you can use.
It wasn’t a file share, I have one of my drives mounted in Linux and in Windows as a general storage drive in a dualboot system
I think you might even be able to get away with /s if you escape them properly in the filename.
Just tried. It processes the escape first and then finds the path with it. Essentially, making it look into a directory made by the characters before the
\/.The above was when I tried:
echo "asd" > asd\/dsaBut then I tried using Dolphin (GUI File Browser) to make a file and:
❯ ls 1 2 3 4 'asd\⁄sad.txt' ❯ ls 1 2 3 4 asd⁄sad.txtIn the first one, the backslash is not the escape character, but part of the text.
Turns out Dolphin just replaces the forward slash with U+2044 “Fraction Slash” character, hence, not requiring any escape. I’d call that cheating, but it works well.
called it, i knew someone would use illegal characters eventually.
I would have a problem if a terminal app were to do something like this, but for GUI apps, it is expected for them to make stuff easier.
And I feel like, if you were to use a slash in a file name, it would most probably be either an “or” slash or a fraction slash, so the substitution is fine in my books.I would have a problem if a terminal app were to do something like this, but for GUI apps, it is expected for them to make stuff easier. And I feel like, if you were to use a slash in a file name, it would most probably be either an “or” slash or a fraction slash, so the substitution is fine in my books.
it’s close enough, i generally consider an “illegal” character a non typable character. Especially these alt characters that are visually hard to distinguish from others such as the forward slash for example, i believe this was the same character used for a handful of somewhat clever phishing scams.
Seems like it’s fair enough to me.
i’m not sure if you’re allowed to escape the / character, i feel like it’s blatantly illegal. But you could use the funny character set trolling thing instead, where you use a not forward slash instead. (not the \)
I’m fairly confident MacOS allows it, I’ve seen people do some Utterly Cursed shit in MacOS, but idk about Linux
maybe on macos, that might be funny, it’s probably fucky over there for some other reason anyway.
Im pretty sure it’s just explicitly illegal in linux though.
That’s a great feature, actually, it saves you from using Windows
I sometimes run into this when I extract an archive file on Windows and there are files named with different cases but are otherwise the same. I prefer case-sensitivity because I like precision and fewer assumptions being made about a system and how it’s used.
file.txt
file.TXT
file.tXt
etcIs it just me or is that more of a hinderance?
I absolutely fail to see the utility of having a user called Bob and bob, or a dir called Downloads and downloads. Capitalisation makes sense in code - at a glance I can know I’m looking at a Class or a var, but for system administration it has only ever wasted time, and not once made anything easier.
If capitalisation is used to indicate the start of words then it could make sense for a webserver to serve ExpertsExchange and ExpertSexChange. But yeah having 16 possible versions of “main” would be horrendous.
URLs aren’t case-sensitive though, so wouldn’t those necessarily have another kind of differentiator?
Definitely an inconvenient thing.
I honestly don’t get why everyone is agreeing with Windows on this one. I just love how explicit Linux is.
file.txt is fucking file.txt. Don’t do any type extra magic. Do exactly as I’m saying. If I say “open file.txt”, it is “open file.txt”, not “open File.txt”.
The feature isn’t being able to create filenames with the same name, nobody does that. The feature is how explicit it is.
It would be so confusing to read some code trying to access FILE.TXT and then find the filesystem has file.txt
Yeah
I throw that at every party for years now and they still don’t get it.
