Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On Mon, 28 Apr 2025 13:27:32 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:

On 4/28/25 10:56, John Ames wrote:

On Sun, 27 Apr 2025 10:21:55 +0000 Farley Flud <ff@linux.rocks> wrote:
 

We all should hate case insensitive file systems.

 
Why?

 
I imagine that his argument will be something along the lines of "it's
fascism for my system not to be able to differentiate between Green the
surname and green the colour." I actually agree that if I name a file
green.odt, it should be obvious that it is the text I wrote about how
much I love the colour and not the text I wrote about the Green family.
However, most people are not that bright and would prefer case
insensitivity because they would prefer to name a document
greencolour.odt or greenfamily.odt.

Otoh is you're dealing with a database you very seldom care if the field
is 'Green Eggs', 'green eggs', GREEN EGGS', or 'Green eggs'. However with
a case sensitive database like DB2 you have to use UCASE or LOWER,
relatively expensive operations at run time, or make sure all data is
entered in lower or upper case.

Ironically, DB2 is case insensitive for table and column names.