Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On Fri, 02 May 2025 07:10:29 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-05-02, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

On Fri, 02 May 2025 00:15:50 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>

We encountered a bug in the sort routine used by Micro Focus
COBOL. By default it created ridiculously small work files, so
when we tried sorting a very large file, the numeric portion of
work file names (of the form "worknnn") ran up to 999, wrapped
around, and carried into the alphanumeric portion - which ran all
the way up the ASCII chart, wrapped around to \0, and worked up
from there. After the inevitable crash, we had 12,000 work files
to get rid of, which had just about any character value in their
names. What a mess.

>
Weren’t they all in a temporary work directory?

 
Unfortunately, no.

Ah. But they did all begin with “WORK”, did they not? Didn’t “DELETE
WORK???” or “DELETE WORK*”, ahem, work?