On Feb 20, 2009, at 15:20 , Rolf Turner wrote:
On 20/02/2009, at 1:29 PM, Timothy Bates wrote:
Dear Rolf,
By default, the file system is not case-sensitive.
So the answer to file.exists(".Rdata") is correct. And you won't be
able to write .RData without overwriting .Rdata
You can format a drive with a case-sensitive file system if you wish
(Spotlight:Disk Utility), but many applications won't be happy to
find
folders containing files with the same (insensitive) name inside.
So I'd probably be opening a massive can of worms for myself if I
tried
to go the re-formatting route. I guess I'll just have to live with
the
case-insensitivity. It seems a really dumb design choice on the part
of Apple, but. They have a perfectly good Unix system underlying
their
shaganappi GUI structure, but they let it get mucked up by this case-
insensitivity
shambles.
As always, it's purely historical reasons. The unix layer is agnostic
to those issues and HFS+ design couldn't care less about the case (in
fact it's much more difficult to create a "real" case-insensitive FS
such as HFS+ nowadays with unicode etc.) - it's just something that
seemed a good idea long time ago (before OS X). As noted, case-
sensitive HFS+ (more precisely HFSX with keyCompareType set to
kHFSBinaryCompare) is around ever since OS X 10.3 for those who think
they need it. (As an aside - I believe the POSIX certification of OS X
10.5 is for the case-sensitive version of HFSX).
I wouldn't recommend reformatting. Since not all apps are happy it's
much easier (and safer) to just add another partition formated case-
sensitively (HFSX or ZFS I'd say) which you can then use as desired
for projects that require case-sensitivity. In general due to the fact
that the vast majority of all users have case-insensitive file systems
(Windows and default HFS+ on OS X) it's a good idea to test on a case-
insensitive system to see whether things break. [I like HFS+ for web
servers because I really hate case-sensitivity of URLs if you have to
type them...].
An upgrade to 10.6 is not likely to change the case-sensitivity of
existing partitions, either. The ZFS comment in this thread was IMHO
entirely irrelevant, because it's not about availability of case-
sensitivity but the existing defaults and I don't see why (or even
how) would Apple perform HFS+ to ZFS conversion during an update.
Cheers,
S
cheers,
Rolf Turner
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