Be aware of case insensivity in the Terminal

Nov 11, '03 09:26:00AM

Contributed by: LouieNet

Beware of case-insensitivity in filenames when working from the Unix command line. In OS versions 10.2.8 and earlier (and on more than one machine), I've always had the following curious messages show up when I repair disk permissions:


Permissions differ on ./usr/share/man/man3/DB.3,
  should be -rw-r--r-- , they are -r--r--r--  
Owner and group corrected on ./usr/share/man/man3/DB.3 
Permissions corrected on ./usr/share/man/man3/DB.3 
Permissions differ on ./usr/share/man/man3/db.3,
  should be -r--r--r-- , they are -rw-r--r--  
Owner and group corrected on ./usr/share/man/man3/db.3 
Permissions corrected on ./usr/share/man/man3/db.3 
So without looking more closely at the man3 directory, I deleted the db.3 file from the command line. But after doing so, I couldn't find my DB.3 file anymore!

Some of you may remember that the Unix side of Mac OX is not as strict with case-sensitivity as other flavors of Unix. I had deleted the DB.3 when I issued the rm db.3 command. Luckily, I was able to copy the DB.3 file from my back-up archive. Being that it's a manpage file, it isn't all that important. I still don't know, though, why Disk Utility would try to correct the permissions for db.3, and "correct" it to be different from DB.3. I do not know if Disk Utility in Pather exhibits this behavior.

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