Actually, if you’re running git on a brain-damaged OS. ntfs, while mounted on linux, is case-sensitive. Windows will happily list all files from fs in explorer, whatever case they are, but treat them as one. And this is deep in win32: http://i.imgur.com/sWnCMdq.png (that’s cygwin, while on linux, I’ve put a small file in the test dir).
Honestly, NT is a good kernel, bogged down by the main userland API. It was designed by some people from DEC, leading to an interesting agreement between Microsoft and them later. This means a lot of it looks suspiciously like VMS.
Amusingly, NTFS supports files with colons in the name. (This breaks the hell out of Windows, of course.) For the most part, NTFS is actually a reasonable filesystem, but Windows has, for a variety of reasons (backwards-compatibility, certainly, but seemingly also incompetence? Cross-compatibility hostility?) a completely broken interface to it.
HFS+ can also support case sensitivity (creation time option). It is generally a questionable idea to install OSX on such a fs though (I did it once accidentally!), but a person could certainly have a separate “work” partition set up that way. That said, I honestly don’t know anybody who does. This comment is only relevant as a piece of trivia.
I’ve been using case-sensitive filesystems exclusively on OS X since Lion and would highly recommend it to anyone working in a developer capacity. The only warning I’ve seen that regularly comes to mind is from Homebrew’s doctor command, and I’ve never experienced any outright failures of software that are case-related.
I’ve also been using case-sensitive HFS+ for many years and haven’t run into any issues in a long time. The issues I did run into were just with specific applications and they were usually very old. Installing to a case-insensitive disk image usually did the trick but I can’t think of anything I still have to do this for.
Do you have to do something special to activate this? My experience with the default settings on OS X is that pretends to understand case, but in reality Directory maps to directory and dIrEcToRy.
I do fresh installs and run Disk Utility from the Tools menu at the top of the screen prior to running the installer itself. As mentioned by jryans, use the case-sensitive, journaled option (with GPT).
HFS+ is a contemporary and was meant more to compete with FAT32, not a shining example of a modern filesystem. It has features like resource forks and creator types not suited for a Unix, but OS X inherited it anyways, and added things like ACLs.
…if you’re running git on a brain-damaged filesystem.
Actually, if you’re running git on a brain-damaged OS. ntfs, while mounted on linux, is case-sensitive. Windows will happily list all files from fs in explorer, whatever case they are, but treat them as one. And this is deep in win32: http://i.imgur.com/sWnCMdq.png (that’s cygwin, while on linux, I’ve put a
smallfile in thetestdir).NT can distinguish case, but the Win32 API cannot without a registry option (optionally installable from SUA)
I’ve totally forgot about this one knob down there in the deepest darkness of win32.
Honestly, NT is a good kernel, bogged down by the main userland API. It was designed by some people from DEC, leading to an interesting agreement between Microsoft and them later. This means a lot of it looks suspiciously like VMS.
Amusingly, NTFS supports files with colons in the name. (This breaks the hell out of Windows, of course.) For the most part, NTFS is actually a reasonable filesystem, but Windows has, for a variety of reasons (backwards-compatibility, certainly, but seemingly also incompetence? Cross-compatibility hostility?) a completely broken interface to it.
I think colons are for alternate data streams
HFS+ can also support case sensitivity (creation time option). It is generally a questionable idea to install OSX on such a fs though (I did it once accidentally!), but a person could certainly have a separate “work” partition set up that way. That said, I honestly don’t know anybody who does. This comment is only relevant as a piece of trivia.
I’ve been using case-sensitive filesystems exclusively on OS X since Lion and would highly recommend it to anyone working in a developer capacity. The only warning I’ve seen that regularly comes to mind is from Homebrew’s doctor command, and I’ve never experienced any outright failures of software that are case-related.
Adobe is a serious offender when it comes to this. Photoshop will not install on a case-sensitive system.
Here’s the hack around it: trap installer function calls, install into a sparsebundle, and symlink into the mounted bundle to run the program. Yuck.
I’ve also been using case-sensitive HFS+ for many years and haven’t run into any issues in a long time. The issues I did run into were just with specific applications and they were usually very old. Installing to a case-insensitive disk image usually did the trick but I can’t think of anything I still have to do this for.
Do you have to do something special to activate this? My experience with the default settings on OS X is that pretends to understand case, but in reality Directory maps to directory and dIrEcToRy.
There is a case sensitive format option in Disk Utility.
I do fresh installs and run Disk Utility from the Tools menu at the top of the screen prior to running the installer itself. As mentioned by jryans, use the case-sensitive, journaled option (with GPT).
HFS+ is a contemporary and was meant more to compete with FAT32, not a shining example of a modern filesystem. It has features like resource forks and creator types not suited for a Unix, but OS X inherited it anyways, and added things like ACLs.