case sensitive file names

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: seismo!hadron!jsdy at sally.utexas.edu (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Cc: jsdy at sally.utexas.edu
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 86 21:16:04 est

>From: @SUMEX-AIM.ARPA:MRC at PANDA  (Mark Crispin)
>Date: Mon 20 Oct 86 05:42:50-PDT
>     On the DEC-20 and Unix file servers, it's single case and hyphens.
>I end up using something like "tokyo-paper.first-draft".

This sounds like a local convention.  Unix filenames may contain
any ASCII character, including upper and lower cases, except for
NUL and '/'.

>nobody uses mixed case on our Unix-based file server.  The Leaf (Xerox
>Lisp machine file access protocol) server on Unix was modified to coerce
>all filenames to be entirely lowercase on the Unix machine's disk and to
>coerce it back to all uppercase in the other direction.  There were/are
>two reasons:
> (1) transfers to/from the third file server, a DEC-20, were hopeless
>     otherwise since the Unix system would insist that two identical files
>     were different because the case of the names didn't match
> (2) the users found the case dependence to be a serious problem.

We now see the source of the discrepancy.  (2) obviously came first:
people who were used to the older (I did NOT say antique ;-) ) file
system on the 20's, and wanted not to worry about filename conversion,
tried to make the restrictions on Unix file names a combination of
the DEC-20's and what they PERCEIVED as the Unix conventions.  This
indubitably has caused further consternation among people familiar
with one or the other but not both systems.

The Leaf server apparently gives this version of Unix a modified file
system with an attempt at monocase restriction.  I have no idea how
prevalent it is, but my off-hand observation is "not very."  I don't
think arguments based on what it does can be very compelling.
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}
			jsdy at hadron.COM (not yet domainised)

Volume-Number: Volume 8, Number 38