Feature request: case insensitivity

[jw schultz]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 12:58:25AM -0500, Ethan Tira-Thompson wrote:
> I sync files to a memory stick fairly frequently.  The memory stick 
> uses a basic FAT format, which kills case.  What's more, on some 
> platforms (Windows), the drivers make all filenames uppercase, whereas 
> on others (linux, mac) all the filenames are lowercase.
> 
> So I currently have a script which will go through the source 
> directory, rename all of the files to all upper or all lower case, and 
> then run rsync.  Otherwise, rsync will try to copy some files every 
> time, even though they haven't changed. (for obvious reasons - it 
> thinks the filenames don't match)
> 
> It would make my life, scripts, and portability much easier if there 
> was an option for rsync to treat files with the same name, ignoring 
> case, to be treated as a filename match.
> 
> This seems like something that would be useful for the several other 
> platforms which do store case, but ignore it for OS file matches.
> 
> (I did look around for any other references to this idea before I 
> posted)

No chance.

Doing this in kernel space is ugly, slow and prone to
inconsistant results due to aliases.  Doing case
insensitivity in something like rsync is even worse.

What you seem to be asking for is less that of case
insensitivity than of tolerating filesystems that don't
preserve case.  You could try a patch that would force case
in the filelist as it is received but that would probably be
fraught with problems.



-- 
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	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

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