Public bug reported:
I'm on a Dell E1505 with Ubuntu 8.04 with all patches as of Monday, May
19, 2:01 AM (Pacific time).
I'm not sure if this is related to the drives being a specific format or
not, but it doesn't happen on my ReiserFS or NTFS partitions, which are
on my internal hard drive.
This problem happens on two external FAT32 hard drives.
If I change the capitalization of a filename of a file or directory,
Nautilus tells me "The item could not be renamed." This is not a
nautilus-only issue, because this happens when I use mv to rename a file
or folder. By changing capitalization, I mean changing a file's name
from BLAH to blah, or Blah to blah, etc.
In Nautilus, I right-clicked a file or folder, and changed the name to
lowercase. This failed, so I tried using mv, which also failed. I then
tried renaming a bunch of other files and folders by switching from
uppercase to lowercase and vice versa. I also tried changing the case
of a bunch of letters at once. All attempts failed, both in Nautilus
and in gnome-terminal. The virtual console (ctrl-alt-F1) also doesn't
rename the file (it tells me that the two names are the same, yet it
doesn't spit this error out when I do the same operation to files on my
ReiserFS partition.)
It seems FAT32 doesn't make any distinction between lowercase and
uppercase (I just cd into a directory while using lowercase letters when
the name of the directory has uppercase letters.) Either way,
regardless of the file system involved, I would expect consistent
behavior. Because Nautilus does sort files by case (lowercase before
uppercase), the capitalization DOES matter, therefore even if FAT32
doesn't differentiate between lower and uppercase, Ubuntu should
intervene somehow to allow the changing of the capitalization without
any hassles.
What I mean is, even if FAT32 doesn't distinguish between lowercase and
uppercase, humans do see a difference and Nautilus does behave
differently (it sorts the files differently based on capitalization.)
Also, it still is possible to change the capitalization by changing the
filename to an intermediate step (ex. changing "Blah" to "lah" to
"blah"), which changes how the files are displayed in Nautilus.
I do not have external drives in any other format, nor do I have any
FAT32 partitions on my internal hard drive, so I can't be any more
specific than that. I'm not sure what to name this bug, so when I was
searching for this bug (hoping it was already submitted), I could not
find anything similar. I'm also not sure under what package I should
file, because I'm not sure what handles file operations.
If your logic is to rule this bug invalid because FAT32 isn't case-
sensitive, then at least the error needs to be more clear... or Nautilus
needs to not sort by capitalization for FAT32 file systems, because
those behaviors are contradictory (you don't differentiate between
lowercase and uppercase, yet you sort files differently?)
** Affects: ubuntu
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
--
Renaming files (changing capitalization) on external USB fat32 drives not
allowed
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/231864
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