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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Feb 20, 2009, at 15:20 , Rolf Turner wrote:

>
> On 20/02/2009, at 1:29 PM, Timothy Bates wrote:
>
>> Dear Rolf,
>> By default, the file system is not case-sensitive.
>> So the answer to file.exists(".Rdata") is  correct. And you won't be
>> able to write .RData without overwriting .Rdata
>>
>> You can format a drive with a case-sensitive file system if you wish
>> (Spotlight:Disk Utility), but many applications won't be happy to  
>> find
>> folders containing files with the same (insensitive) name inside.
>
> So I'd probably be opening a massive can of worms for myself if I  
> tried
> to go the re-formatting route.  I guess I'll just have to live with  
> the
> case-insensitivity.  It seems a really dumb design choice on the part
> of Apple, but.  They have a perfectly good Unix system underlying  
> their
> shaganappi GUI structure, but they let it get mucked up by this case- 
> insensitivity
> shambles.
>

As always, it's purely historical reasons. The unix layer is agnostic  
to those issues and HFS+ design couldn't care less about the case (in  
fact it's much more difficult to create a "real" case-insensitive FS  
such as HFS+ nowadays with unicode etc.) - it's just something that  
seemed a good idea long time ago (before OS X). As noted, case- 
sensitive HFS+ (more precisely HFSX with keyCompareType set to  
kHFSBinaryCompare) is around ever since OS X 10.3 for those who think  
they need it. (As an aside - I believe the POSIX certification of OS X  
10.5 is for the case-sensitive version of HFSX).

I wouldn't recommend reformatting. Since not all apps are happy it's  
much easier (and safer) to just add another partition formated case- 
sensitively (HFSX or ZFS I'd say) which you can then use as desired  
for projects that require case-sensitivity. In general due to the fact  
that the vast majority of all users have case-insensitive file systems  
(Windows and default HFS+ on OS X) it's a good idea to test on a case- 
insensitive system to see whether things break. [I like HFS+ for web  
servers because I really hate case-sensitivity of URLs if you have to  
type them...].

An upgrade to 10.6 is not likely to change the case-sensitivity of  
existing partitions, either. The ZFS comment in this thread was IMHO  
entirely irrelevant, because it's not about availability of case- 
sensitivity but the existing defaults and I don't see why (or even  
how) would Apple perform HFS+ to ZFS conversion during an update.

Cheers,
S



> 	cheers,
>
> 		Rolf Turner
>
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