On Fri, 11 May 2018 07:06:11 -0700, Charles Mills wrote:

>Oh for gosh sakes! Every operating system is different. There is no eleventh 
>commandment "filenames shall be 44 uppercase characters" that UNIX violated. 
>Tell him a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Or that the 
>inability to learn new things is a sign of old age.
>
>Or point out that z/OS is case-dependent. Don't think so? Try referencing 
>'sys1.maclib'.
> 
Peter Relson (among others) lectures me that such data set names and member 
names
are "invalid"; GIGO.  If invalid, why does DFSMS allow me to create (but not 
catalog) them?
Limited resources a half-century ago for such error checking is the weakest of 
excuses:
nowadays that error checking could easily be added.  Or z/OS could be made 
case-insensitive.

NTFS *is* case-sensitive.  Cygwin tells me of a bit in Registry that tells 
applications whether to
call the I/O system in a case-sensitive or insensitive manner.  (Also need to 
tweak /etc/fstab
for Cygwin.)  Alas, most applications ignore that setting and use 
case-insensitive.  With Cygwin
I created several files in one directory with names differing only in character 
case.  Cygwin
treats them cleanly.  Explorer displays all with correct names, but when I 
click on one it's
unpredictable which opens.  "dir" displays all correctly: names, sizes, and 
timestamps.  Again,
when I use one in a cmd.exe command it's unpredictable which one is actually 
used.  Cygwin
warns that executable command search is unconditionally case-insensitive.

I hate EBCDIC!  I wish IBM had provided just an EBCDIC kernel and let FOSS 
supply the shell
and utilities.

Woe be unto web developers who code URLs with chaotic cases then try to port 
their
site to a UNIX Apache server!

-- gil

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