How would a case-insensitive magic_open() call work?

Posted Feb 19, 2004 9:11 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
Parent article: The kernel and character set encodings

Suppose I have two files named "Foobar" and "foobaR" in a particular directory. The user (possibly Samba) calls magic_open("foobar", ...). What can be expected to happen?

I think this proposed magic_open() call is almost as bad an idea as providing an option to allow normal open()s (or the filesystem code) to be case insensitive. The few applications that really need this sort of behavior should implement it in user space by reading the directory, and they can worry about how to handle ambiguous cases there.

How would a case-insensitive magic_open() call work?

Posted Feb 19, 2004 19:42 UTC (Thu) by chad.netzer (subscriber, #4257) [Link]

You get an arbitrary file. Tridge suggests that (so far) he hasn't gotten complaints about this kind of behavior (which already exists in Samba), and there are few good alternatives. One possible alternative, to try to keep track of which files are created by Posix systems, and which are created by Windows systems, and preferentially decide between the two, seems like too much work if no one really cares.

The whole case insensitivity issue of Windows is (apparently) a mess, and there appears to be no perfect policy about what to do when interoperating, other than try to do the thing which makes most practical sense.