Re: case sensitive filenames

From:

Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:24:21 +0000

Message-ID:

<Pine.LNX.4.64.0901132122150.20141@urchin.earth.li>

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, Eric Sosman wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, angrybaldguy@gmail.com wrote:

On Jan 12, 4:03 pm, Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote:

Roedy Green wrote:

On 12 Jan 2009 11:01:11 GMT, Andreas Leitgeb
<a...@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

PPS: What would you want it for? (I can imagine some usecases,
myself. I just ask for your specific motivation.)

Right now I have a compile time hard switch in untouch for filename
compare. It takes checksums of files and records the file name, then
later compares them. It needs to know if the current file is one for
which it has previously computed a checksum.

seehttp://mindprod.com/products1.html#UNTOUCH

Symbolic links can also lead to distinct file names for the same file.
Perhaps you should compare canonical File object representations of the
file names, rather than directly comparing file names?

Even that doesn't necessarily help. Hard links, on systems that support
them, imply that a file has *several* canonical names, all equally-valid
and none more canonical than the others.

It doesn't solve the problem completely, but i wouldn't say it doesn't help
- using a canonical path will deal with case-insensitivity and symlinks,
leaving hardlinks the only stumbling-block. And since Roedy is on windows,
IIRC, not one that will trip him up very often!

The fact that he's interested in getting the answer demonstrates
that he's not dealing exclusively with Windows ...

I thought he was interested in dealing with variable case, which is very
much a Windows (well, and Mac) problem.

When do you suppose we'll get a font-sensitive file system? Wouldn't
it be nice if the editor saved the old version of Foo.java not as
Foo.java~ but as <i>Foo.java</i>?

Hmm. Can you do some of this (in DOS, at least) with ANSI escapes?

tom

--
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who happened to hit upon the truth for himself. -- Galileo