this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.
There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library:
GET
,HEAD
, andPOST
. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.But there's also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It's called
head
.I think you see where I'm going with this.
HEAD
andhead
are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.Installing
/usr/bin/HEAD
fromlibwww-perl
onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote/usr/bin/head
and broke various things.Hey I have one of these case sensitive Mac OS X stories as well!
I gave it a try one time, and I found out the hard way some developers don't test everything in a case sensitive environment. I don't remember what specifically went wrong, but Adium, The instant messaging client, blew up because it couldn't find certain files on the local hard drive.