[R-SIG-Mac] Case distinction on a Mac.

[Steve Revilak]

> From: Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>
> Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:47:46 +1300
> Subject: [R-SIG-Mac] Case distinction on a Mac.

> I have noticed that OS X sometimes fails to make a case distinction in
> the names of files.  E.g. if I have a file ``junk'' and I try to create
> a directory using ``mkdir Junk'' it will refuse to do so saying ``file 
> exists''.
>
> Likewise I have just noticed that in R
>
> 	file.exists(".Rdata")
>
> returns TRUE when no file .Rdata exists (but there *is* a file .RData).
>
> This strikes me as an undesirable, uh, feature.  Is there any way that
> I can tell OS X to smarten up about this?

Out of the box, OS X filesystems are formatted as HFS+, which is case
insensitive (but case preserving).

There is are variants of HFS+ that are case sensitive; Disk Utility
refers to them variant as "Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive)" and "Mac
OS Extended (Case Sensitive, journaled)".

If you'd like the file system to be case sensitive, you'll need to
format the drive that way.

Steve