There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there's also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It's called head.

I think you see where I'm going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

[+] MudMan@fedia.io -46 points 3 weeks ago (42 children)

Case insensitive is more intuitive and MUCH safer.

You do not want every Windows user to live in a world where Office.exe, office.exe, Offlce.exe and 0fflce.exe are all different files.

OSs and filesystems aren't built for programmers, they're built for grandmas. Programmers just happen to use them. It's much more sensible to give programmers a harder time fixing bugs and incompatibilities than it is to make the user experience even marginally worse.

I mean, all due respect for the guy, but that is an absolutely terrible opinion and I will die on this hill.

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn't matter to the "nontechnical" end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of "creating a file" has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io -1 points 3 weeks ago

I found this post confusing because on the face of it, it sounds like you agree with me.

I mean, yeah, HEAD and head should overwrite each other.

As you say, only technical command-line users care about the case sensitivity. So no, it shouldn't matter to the nontechnical user. And because the nontechnical user doesn't care about the distinction if something is called "head" in any permutation it shares a name with anything else called "head". And the rules are items within a directory have unique filenames. So "head" and "HEAD" aren't unique.

The issue isn't that the names are case insensitive, the issue is that two applications are using the same name in the same path.

If we're not careful that'll lead to a question about whether consolidating things in the Unix-style directory structure is a bad idea. I normally tend to be neutral on that choice, but you make a case for how the DOS/Windows structure that keeps all binaries, libraries and dependencies under the same directory at the cost of redundancy doesn't have this problem to begin with.

But either way, if two pieces of software happen to choose the same name they will step over each other. The problem there is neither with case sensitivity or case insensitivity. The problem there is going back and forth between the two in a directory structure that doesn't fence optional packages under per-application directories. As you say, this is only possible in a very particular scenario (and not what the post in question is about anyway).

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