this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Remember: GNU/Linux and other UNIX systems can make files that are case-sensitive, Windows can't make files that are case-sensitive (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

give me one use case where it makes sense having several files with the same name but different cases in the same directory

Imagine a table in a database where the primary key is a case sensitive character field, because you know varchars, just like C char types and string types in other languages are case sensitive.

Imagine a database administrator does the following:

  • Export all data with primary key = 'Abcde' to 'Abcde.csv'

Imagine a second database adminstrator around the same time does the following:

  • Export all data with primary key = 'abcde' to 'abcde.csv'

Now imagine this is the GDPR data of two different users.

If you have a case insensitive file system, you've just overwritten something you shouldn't have and possibly even leaked confidential data.

If you have a case sensitive file system you don't have to account for this scenario. If the PK is unique, the filename will be unique, end of story.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you don't do something stupid like reuse keys just with different capitalization, this never occurs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

The point is you have to take this into account, so the decision to go with a case insensitive file system has ripple effects much further down your system. You have to design around it at every step in code where a string variable results in a file being written to or read from.

It's much more elegant if you can simply assume that a particular string will 1-on-1 match with a unique filename.

Even Microsoft understands this btw, their Azure Blob Storage system is case sensitive. The only reason NTFS isn't (by default) is because of legacy. It had to be compatible with all uppercase 8.3 filenames from DOS/FAT16.