Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On Mon, 28 Apr 2025 15:46:56 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:

The biggest issue I envision anyone having with case sensitivity is not
remembering what they saved a certain file as. However, if you know that
the document deals with green eggs, searching for it despite not
remembering the document filename should be trivial.

I was talking about databases. In DB2

'SELECT author FROM books WHERE title LIKE 'green eggs%'

is only going to match 'green eggs' exactly. If you're not sure how the
record was stored you would need LOWER(title).

The equivalent directory search would be something like

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "green eggs"

The difference is the directory search is probably going to be a one-shot.
The SQL statement may be executed thousands of times and LOWER() is
costly.

I'm curious how SQL Server or Access handles case insensitivity in the
internals. However it's done it's faster than explicit conversions at
runtime.