Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 28, 2018 16:09 UTC (Wed) by sorokin (guest, #88478)
In reply to: Filesystems and case-insensitivity by sorokin
Parent article: Filesystems and case-insensitivity

BTW, even if user want to work with files in case insensitive manner, that does not mean that underlying filesystem must be case insensitive.

For example I can imagine that save file dialog can ask the following question: "You are trying to create file Foo.txt while foo.txt already exists. Do you want to create another file that differs only in
letter case."

Correspondingly open file dialog first look for exact match and if no file is found search for file case insensitively. I would like having convenience feature like this even now.

My point is that this should be done only in limited number of user facing dialogs. Doing this for most existing system calls would be inefficient and can be incorrect if filenames are used as opaque keys.

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 28, 2018 20:34 UTC (Wed) by saffroy (guest, #43999) [Link]

Doing this for most existing system calls would be inefficient

Well, it really depends on the use case (pun intended). Once I added case-insensitivity support to a proprietary filesystem specifically to improve performance, with great success.

Consider a case-sensitive folder with 10.000 files (this is not rare at all), shared over Samba. Every time a Samba client requests creation of a new file, and because the client requires case insensitivity, Samba has to scan the entire folder to check if the new name collides with an existing name. Yes, that's for every new file.

If the filesystem is actually case-insensitive, Samba can skip these scans, which is a huge performance boost.