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

On 30/04/2025 11:06, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:45:20 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

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.)

 I've seen on more than one occasion C++ (not C yet) projects where there
were 2 files only different in case, eg: Network.cpp and network.cpp where
the former would be the class and the latter would be procedural support code.

I'd question the wisdom of such a convention.  I'd rather have clearer separation of the filenames, or perhaps use different directories, aiming to make it hard to mix up the names.  But maybe it is an appropriate choice in some situations - perhaps alternative naming schemes were considered worse in other ways.

Good luck unzipping that on Windows or any other case insensitive file system.