Is linux/unix case sensitive or not?

[Xiaoshen Li]

Hi,

Some books (and some people) told me that linux is case insensitive. I
tried on my computer (RedHat 7.3). It is case sensitive. Is that
information out of dated or I somehow misunderstood what they are saying?

Thank you again.

 

[Marc Boyer]

Some books (and some people) told me that linux is case insensitive.

You seems to have very bad books.

tried on my computer (RedHat 7.3). It is case sensitive. Is that
information out of dated or I somehow misunderstood what they are saying?

What is the question on the C language ?

Marc Boyer

 

[Paramesh]

Hi,

C is case sensitive language in any operating system.

No book will mention that C is case insenstive.

May be you misunderstood them.

Regards,
Paramesh.

 

[Christopher Benson-Manica]

Some books (and some people) told me that linux is case insensitive.

They are sadly misinformed. In the future, please take Linux
questions to comp.unix.programmer. Please read the following links
before posting again to comp.lang.c.

http://www.ungerhu.com/jxh/clc.welcome.txt
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
http://benpfaff.org/writings/clc/off-topic.html

 

[Flash Gordon]

Hi,

Some books (and some people) told me that linux is case insensitive. I
tried on my computer (RedHat 7.3). It is case sensitive. Is that
information out of dated or I somehow misunderstood what they are saying?

What on earth does this have to do with C? I suggest you try a Linux
group and when you ask be a bit more specific as to whether you mean
file names, user names, passwords, accessing FAT file systems or what.

 

[pete]

What on earth does this have to do with C?

It affects how you should write arguments to the
standard library system function.

I suggest you try a Linux
group and when you ask be a bit more specific as to whether you mean
file names, user names, passwords, accessing FAT file systems or what.

Good idea.

 

[Ed Vogel]

Hi,

C is case sensitive language in any operating system.

No book will mention that C is case insenstive.

The C89 standard contains the following (In the section concerning
Identifiers):

"The implementation may further restrict the significance of an external
name (an identifer that has external linkage) to six characters and may
ignore the distinctions of alphabetical case for such names)."

So, strictly speaking a conforming C89 implemtation may be case-sensitive
for external names. C99 removed this.

Perhaps this is where the confusion came from.

Ed Vogel

 

[Keith Thompson]

The C89 standard contains the following (In the section concerning
Identifiers):

"The implementation may further restrict the significance of an external
name (an identifer that has external linkage) to six characters and may
ignore the distinctions of alphabetical case for such names)."

So, strictly speaking a conforming C89 implemtation may be case-sensitive
for external names. C99 removed this.

Perhaps this is where the confusion came from.

This would be relevant to the original question only if a C
implementation on Linux took advantage of this permission.

 

[James McIninch]

<posted & mailed>

Nothing in the C language specification actually touches on the issue.

Linux is an operating system kernel. I suppose one could say it is "case
sensitive" in the sense that it most certainly has parts that deal with
ASCII, which has both upper and lower case letters.