Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On 30/04/2025 09:17, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 01:54:06 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wibbled:

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 07:40:33 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:
>

Case insensitve file systems are an abortion that no sane OS should use.

>
Linux at least offers the option.

 AFAIK there's no case insensitive filesystem for linux.
 

ext4 supports case-insensitive directories.  You need a relatively modern kernel, an ext4 filesystem formatted with the "casefold" option enabled, then set the case folding extended attribute on an empty directory.  So it's not something you'd do unintentionally, but it is certainly supported.  The primary use-case is for Wine for Windows programs and games, and it might also be useful for Samba servers.
More relevant to this group, it make also be convenient for people trying to work with big C code bases that were written on Windows and you now want to compile (for whatever target you want) them on Linux. I've seen code bases developed on Windows machines where the capitalisation of include directives was inconsistent - that works on case-insensitive filesystems, but not on case-sensitive systems.  (Yes, I know there are many other ways to deal with such issues, but putting the source code in a case-insensitive directory on ext4 is one option.)
Linus Torvalds has just had one of his famous rants in reference to case-insensitive options for Bcachefs :
<https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Anti-Case-Fold>
You are going to have trouble if you try to install a typical Linux distribution on a case-insensitive filesystem, but Linux does have at least some support in some filesystems.