case sensitive filenames
Moderator, John Quarterman
std-unix at ut-sally.UUCP
Tue Nov 4 06:12:11 AEST 1986
From: seismo!utai!utcsri!mcgill-vision!mouse
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 86 05:28:02 EST
In article <6107 at ut-sally.UUCP> mckenney at sri-unix.arpa (Paul E. McKenney) writes:
[that what he said above leaves unaddressed]
> o Whether the eighth bit on characters within a filename should be
> significant. The developers of BSD 4.[23] must have had some good
> reason for making it insignificant, but the only reason that comes
> to mind is that most terminals cannot easily specify the eighth bit
> (just like some older terminals cannot easily specify lower
> case!).
There are also programs (the shell comes to mind) that use the eighth
bit for their own purposes. I believe the shell uses it as a quote
indicator. Although it is not relevant to filenames, I seem to recall
seeing some code along the lines of curses that used the eighth bit to
indicate highlighting. Also, all the 7-bit characters can be specified
to (say) rm by careful use of quotes or backslashes. With most
terminals, this is not possible for 8th-bit-set characters, and even if
the terminal and tty driver could handle it, as I implied above the
shell would strip it anyway. So you *couldn't* do anything with such
files.
der Mouse
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Volume-Number: Volume 8, Number 26
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