I don't recall those questions at all, however it is not at all
obvious that 'HEAD' is going to replace 'head'. I'm not sure I
understand the earlier comment about case insensitive filesystems.
Certainly, OS X is not case insensitive at the CLI level, although
'Finder' is.
That's complete nonsense, as the simplest test will show:
~ sherm$ echo "Hello world" > head
~ sherm$ cat HEAD
Hello world
HFS+ is a case-insensitive file system. Finder has nothing
whatsoever to do with it - it's just a user-level file manager.
base:~ me$ echo "hello Mac OS X mailing list" > head
base:~ me $ cat HEAD
cat: HEAD: No such file or directory
base:~ me $ cat head
hello Mac OS X mailing list
base:~ me $
;-)
Yes, my boot volume is HFS+, and I have not moved the user
directories off of it on this machine.
Explanation:
Case sensitivity is a property of the file system, which is separate
from the shells (both CLI and GUI).
Current versions of Mac OS X (from at least 10.2) allow you to
specify case sensitivity on both UFS and HFS+ volumes when you
partition a drive. I always format all my volumes case sensitive,
except for the volume I keep classic on.
I'm not sure if it's possible to change the case sensitivity when re-
formatting existing partitions, and it would take more time than I
want to take right now to check.
As a side note, I prefer to put /usr/local, /www, and similar stuff
on separate volumes formatted UFS as much as possible. Those are also
case sensitive, of course.
An even further off-topic complaint, it would be nice to be able to
make an even finer cut, and put /var/log, /tmp, /var/tmp, etc. on
separate partitions as damage-limiting measures, but, one, I run out
of partitions when I do things like dual-boot openbsd, and, two, I
won't trust Mac OS X's handling of hard or soft links to that level
until /etc/fstab is respected before autodiskmount or whatever it's
called kicks in. I've got swap on a separate partition on one of my
old machines with limited hard disk space, and it definitely speeds
that old machine up, but I don't recommend playing those tricks on a
machine that I want to load arbitrary applications on.
(Any Apple people reading the list, please note that there are good
reasons for allowing /etc/fstab to do its job.)
