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Comment by trasz | Hacker News Reader

Allowing multiple files with the same file name - differing just by case - is rather silly from a human point of view.

There are bigger problems, though - currently Linux allows having multiple files with the exact same file name, differing only by UTF-8 normalisation.

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Yes, I would quite like to see Linux filesystems require that file names be in valid UTF-8, with no new lines, at the very least. Normalisation would be a bonus but I'd want to do it a way that is helpful for compatibility with macOS and Windows.

That would definitely be a breaking change. I had some Python code that broke when running over the Boost source code because they include a test file in there that isn't valid UTF-8, so the files definitely exist. Admittedly that's a fairly contrived example (i.e. the deliberately didn't use UTF-8). Maybe it wouldn't be so bad in practice.

There are two ZFS options, “normalization” and “utf8only”, which are documented to do precisely this (https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?zfs). Never used it myself, though.

> Allowing multiple files with the same file name - differing just by case - is rather silly from a human point of view.

In the current paradigm where files are predominantly accessed by a path and filename, yes. But that need not be the only nor the best way of referring to persistently stored data.

Why? We are used to that a lot of stuff can have the same name. Many humans have the same name.

Having a unique name is uncommon.

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