Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred for Case-Insensitive File-Systems

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Anti-Case-Fold

12•Bender•6h ago

Comments

PaulHoule•6h ago

It's some kind of game theory game. If software and data is being transferred between Windows and Unix system it will be rare for Unix software to break on Windows, yet, Windows allow carelessness about capitalization which breaks when you round trip to Linux. Embrace, Extend, Exterminate, etc.

p_ing•6h ago

Windows can be configured to have whole-volume case-sensitivity with NTFS, or even directory-specific case-sensitivity.

However, case-sensitivity is user-unfriendly. README.DOCX, Readme.docx, ReAdMe.DocX -- which document did they really want? When Jane Doe calls and tells John Doe to open the "readme" document, which one does she mean?

PaulHoule•5h ago

If I ask the question of "would it be perverse to deliberately write code to systematically depending on case?" I think about coding 11001000 as 'AAaaAaaa' or instead of a random identifier written like 798951cb-9fa4-4ca6-9a36-6b098a9cbd25 you write likewise in more or less

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85

that last would be clever but unwise to write to the filesystem

jasonthorsness•5h ago

Case-insensitive helpers around a case-sensitive filenames are the best of both worlds. I don't want hello.txt to BE the same as Hello.txt, I just want to find it without using a capital letter. Thanks to this thread I just discovered <code>bind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on'</code> for bash which is going to make my life as someone who frequently switches between WSL2 and Windows cmd more pleasant.

betelgeuse6•4m ago

Having both hello.txt and Hello.txt is bad design in the first place no matter how you view it.

cranberryturkey•5h ago

macOS also is case insensitive

joecool1029•5h ago

Likewise Linus also considers HFS+ a piece of shit filesystem: https://archive.is/R5eWO

Recent news of Linux also considering removing the drivers for it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-2025-Sad-State-HFS

BobbyTables2•5h ago

Case sensitive OSes like Linux don’t mix well with case insensitive file systems.

Take files under /boot/EFI (FAT). Packaging systems fall down on such — two RPMs can have different cases of the same filename and the package manager won’t know. They’ll just subtly overwrite each others file depending on installation/upgrade order.

(And why should the package manager have to care about the case sensitivity of the underlying file system for each managed file?)

meitham•3h ago

I grew to like case insensitive dbms like SQLServer as it makes me think less about casing when I write queries, but always wondered if that comes at cost of performance!

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