> Please define "canonicalize" If the same thing can be referred to by a number of different names and the convention is that one is the "one true", or canonical, name and the others are mere aliases then canonicalisation (or canonicalization for a non-Brit) is the process of translating a name into the canonical name of that object. Of course this assumes that no two objects can have the same name.
In the context of case-insensitive file systems, it's often the case that a file is given the canonical name that it was created with ("MyFile") with all other capitalisations ("myfile", "myfilE") being alternative names for the same filename. Of course, the situation is complicated not only by symlinks but also that in unix the same file can have many filenames. The normal canonicalisation for a file, as opposed to filename, is (device, inode number) but that's not always very useful: for security reasons you can't actually open a file from its device and inode number. John