Non-case sensitive filesystem on Linux - HOWTO
I had a quick look to see if I could fix it up but quickly figured out that there were too many occurrences and so it was likely not worth fixing up at this point. To that end I set up a loopback vfat filesystem so that I could have a directory on my machine mounted as non-case sensitive.
Note: this is not recommended for production systems - but is a handy fix for a temporary development problem.
Create a virtual disk
Format it
Mount it
sudo mount virtual.dsk /mnt/vfat -t vfat -o loop,owner,group,umask=000
You can set this up to mount every time by putting the following line in your /etc/fstab
Note - the same trick works on OSX in reverse. I.e. if you are developing on a mac, but deploying to a linux production environment you can create a virtual disk with a case-sensitive filename, which will mean that any case sensitive issues get picked up on your dev machine, and not on your production/staging machines.
Cheers, Mark
That's quite an elegant approach. Why would you not recommend it for a production environment?
What do you think of using an actual vfat partition that contained only non-executable read-only documents for indexing purposes? My thoughts are that it could be mounted read-write during updates, but otherwise leave it mounted as read-only.
We went through the same thing you did with .cfm files, and painstakingly made the corrections on Windows.
Now, we're moving a library of thousands of documents to Linux from Windows, and the case mismatch issue is overwhelming, so I'm looking for something along the lines of what you are doing as a remedy.
Re production use - you would definitely be better off using a vfat partition on a physical disk than a loopback mount.
I think it would certainly work - but would suggest that it be a short term solution while the documents are cleaned up.
What kind of documents are they? Is it similar to my cfm problem that it is code and when referencing other files the case sensitivity issues are give file not found errors? It should be possible to automate much of the fixing by implementing a few rules. I.e. all lower case filenames and search through the code.
Best of luck and keen to hear what you do.
Cheers,
Mark