Renaming files (answer)

© November 2006 Anthony Lawrence

2006/11/21

This is the answer to Detective: Renaming files

First, I did have a little hint here: I knew this customer had been thinking about buying a Mac. But the reason his files were being clobbered has to do with Mac's HFS+ file system: "Apple" and "apple" are NOT two different files. If he had begun his script with "set -o noclobber", Bash would have refused to overwrite, but as written, the "> $j" cleared out each file before the "sed" even ran.

Apple does have an optional HFSX file system which can be case sensitive. It isn't necessarily: Apple Tech Note TN1150 says:

An HFSX volume may be either case-sensitive or case-insensitive. Case sensitivity (or lack thereof) is global to the volume; the setting applies to all file and directory names on the volume. To determine whether an HFSX volume is case-sensitive, use the keyCompareType field of the B-tree header of the catalog file. A value of kHFSBinaryCompare means the volume is case-sensitive. A value of kHFSCaseFolding means the volume is case-insensitive.

Note: Do not assume that an HFSX volume is case-sensitive. Always use the keyCompareType to determine case-sensitivity or case-insensitivity.

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