[TxMt] Beware of creating files with names that differ only in case!

Chris Fonnesbeck listservs at mac.com
Thu Aug 16 18:28:59 UTC 2007


I discovered a little quirk of TextMate this afternoon that cost me several 
hours of work. 

I had a file within a project called "distributions.py", and wanted to make
 a new file called "Distributions.py" to experiment with a few things. 
When I created this file, it generated a new file, but rather than the usual 
template, it contained the contents of distributions.py. Fine, I thought, 
I was going to copy some of the contents of "distributions.py" over 
anyway. I went ahead and heavily edited Distributions.py, including 
deleting much of the original contents. 

I was shocked to find that when I went back to the original file, all 
the editing that I had done in the new file was mirrored in the second! 
I had done enough editing that I was unable to undo changes to get most 
of it back. Several hours of work -- gone.

Why on earth did creating a *new* file in a project apparently just 
create some sort of symbolic link to an existing file?? 2 different files 
"Distributions.py" and "distributions.py" both appeared in the project list, 
and both had their own tabs. Does this have something to do with having 
files that differ only in case? Very frustrating.




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