[H-GEN] Case Sensitivity

[Martin Pool]

On 12 Feb 2001, David Duffy <avd at audiovisualdevices.com.au> wrote:

> Hi,
> I've got a Win98SE peer to peer network that each map a drive
> to a FAT32 HDD in my Linux box. It all works great apart from
> some odd things with filename & directory case.
> 
> If I have a directory called "TEST" for example and I try to change it
> to "test" or Test" from the Windows machines, it just stays the same
> as it was. Same goes for filenames as well. Most of the time this does
> not make any difference but I need the case to be correct for the html
> data I have there for my web site. Even if I rename the offending file or
> directory to something else then back to what I want it still goes back
> to what it was originally! Is this normal? Any way around it?

DOS-descended filesystems are case-insensitive, and VFAT and NTFS are
kind-of-case-preserving.  I say kind of because there are special-case
kludges that apply to files all in upper case, presumably to ease the
migration from DOS to W95.

So from Windows' point of view, renaming "TEST" to "test" or "Test" is
a no-op, and so it does not transmit the request to the server.
You've already discovered the workaround: rename the file to "temp"
first, then to the name you really wanted.  Alternatively, set Samba
to always collapse case, or rename the file on the Linux machine.

-- 
Martin Pool, Human Resource
Linuxcare. Inc.   +61 2 6262 8990
mbp at linuxcare.com.au, http://linuxcare.com.au/
Linuxcare.  Putting Open Source to work.
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