Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On 2 May 2025 17:18:10 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
 

For one thing it makes shell scripting complicated ...

 
This may be true of a straight POSIX shell, but there are techniques for
coping with arbitrary filenames in Bash, just for example.
 

... and for another this is just really confusing ...

 
Just tried it:
 
   ldo@theon:try> touch file1 file2$'\n'file3 file4
   ldo@theon:try> ls -1
   file1
   'file2'$'\n''file3'
   file4

Ah yes, I forgot I'm using an older version of Busybox "ls" here.
That does seem to work OK in new GNU Coreutils "ls".

   ldo@theon:try> ls -1 --quoting-style=literal
   file1
   file2?file3
   file4

That (also recent Busybox "ls") allows for two apparantly identical
files in the same directory:

$ touch 'good?file' good$'\n'file
$ ls -1 --quoting-style=literal
good?file
good?file

And more, with other non-printing characters in the same position
also replaced by '?'.

It's also how recent GNU Find handles them:

$ find
.
./good?file
./good?file

Busybox Find outputs them litterally:

$ busybox find
.
./good?file
./good
file

Wasn't so bad, was it?

Well now it's gone from the bad situation of confusing filename
output to the worse situation of completely different output from
different common command-line programs, often also confusing. Even
more reason why newlines should never be in file names in the first
place. Things only work OK because people rarely actually use them,
probably because command-line users know better and graphical
programs mercifully don't tend to support creating them.

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