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

[Jay Soffian]

On Aug 16, 2007, at 2:38 PM, Chris Fonnesbeck wrote:

> 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.

HFS/HFS+ is traditionally a case-preserving, but case-insensitive  
file-system:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_preservation

As of 10.4, HFS+ supports case-sensitivity. When you create a new- 
volume, you can enable case-sensitivity, but this is not the default.  
As well, my guess is that if you tried to install OS X on a case- 
sensitive HFS+ volume, it would break quite a few applications that  
simply haven't been QA'd in such a scenario.

This isn't a fault of TextMate.

FWIW, NTFS is the same way. This is likely to catch Unix-geeks by  
surprise since ufs and other unix-like file-systems (xfs, zfs, ext2/ 
ext3, reiserfs, etc) are all case-sensitive.

Feel free to fire up Disk Utility, create a disk image, then click on  
the Erase tab and notice the following options:

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j.