Re: file name case-sensitivity issues

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 11:17:48AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Maybe this has been mentioned already but I wanted to point out that Cygwin's mount has a "managed" option: "mount -o managed c:/foo /foo" which causes cygwin to encode "problem" characters into the filename.

This means that there is a possibility that you'll run into the Windows 260 character max filename limit sooner so many people don't like to use this option. However, since only uppercase characters and characters like ">", ":", etc. are encoded, in practice you wouldn't see path length problems *from this* very often. There is, of course, some processing overhead involved in this, too, so using managed mode will slow things down slightly.

We've been contemplating using Unicode functions in cygwin for a while since those allow much longer path lengths but this is a massive change and would potentially cause problems on Windows 9x. There has also been some discussion of using native NT calls which, I believe, allow case preservation like linux. However, those have a similar set of problems.

FYI, cgf