Thumbs.dbI am not exactly a programmer. What is the .DS_Store file for?
…and whoever decided a file system should be case insensitive by default, I hate you.
What’s the use case for case sensitive file names
Suffering
Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn’t make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).
And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren’t actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.
‘A’ != ‘a’, they are just as unequal as ‘a’ and ‘b’
Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers’ intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.
If I have four files, a.txt, A.txt, b.txt, and B.txt, in what order do they appear when I sort alphabetically?
edit: I don’t understand why this was downvoted?
a, A, b, B?
A computer will spit out A, B, a, b
See also: ASCII chart
Case insensitive handling protects end-users from doing “bad” things and confusion.
I work with a lot of users and a lot of files in my job.
I don’t remember a single case, where someone had an issue because of upper- or lowercase confusions.
Think the other way around: What’s the use case for case insensitive file names? Does it justify the effort and complexity for the filesystem and the programs to know the difference between lower and upper space chars?
The use case for case insensitive file names is all of history has never cared about what case the letters are in for a folder with someone’s name or a folder with an address or a folder for a project name.
Use case for case insensitive file names is literally all of history. All of it.
What’s the use case for case insensitive file names?
Human comprehension.
Readme, readme, README, and ReadMe are not meaningfully different to the average user.
And for dorks like us - oh my god, tab completion, you know I mean Documents, just take the fucking d!
On Mac when I rename a folder from “FOO” to “foo” git sees them as the same folder so no change is committed. In JavaScript I import a file from “foo” so locally that works. Commit my code and someone else pulls in my changes on their machine. But on their machine the folder is still “FOO” so importing from “foo” doesn’t work.
Because I want to?
NTFS absolutely supports case sensitivity but, presumably for consistency with FAT and FAT32 (Windows is all about backwards compatibility), and for the sake of Average-Joe-User who’s only interaction with the filesystem is opening Word and Excel docs, it doesn’t by default.
All that said, it can be set on a per-directory basis: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivity
What’s a windows?
Blue Harvest for Mac will continually clean your removable drives of these files.
Where did this art come from? It seems like the cover to a tabletop wargame about the french and indian war or something.
Hmm… Smells like a windows user aswell… Look at that:
.desktopdesktop.iniEdit: fixed the filename
… You mean desktop.ini?
Ah shit I’ve forgotten the ancient tablets, ill fix that thank you!
System Volume Information
I’ve caught the whiff of some Linux too…
lost+found
.Trash-1000
I saw somebody with Nintendo .DS_store as a username
'u/Nintendo 3/.DS_store'
See also: Let’s roll our own .zip implementation that only Mac can reliably read for…reasons
every time i get a zip file from a mac user it has a folder with random junk in it. what’s up with that? i can open the files without it so clearly those files are unnecessary
Metadata that’s a holdover from the 1980s MacOS behavior. Hilariously, today, NTFS supports that metadata better than Apple’s own filesystems of today. They can hide it in Alternate Data Streams.
Why didn’t they add resource/data forks in APFS?
APFS still supports resource forks just fine - I can unstuff a 1990’s Mac application in Sequoia on a Apple Silicon Mac, copy it to my Synology NAS over SMB, and then access that NAS from a MacOS 9 Mac using AFP and it launches just fine.
The Finder just doesn’t use most of it so that it gets preserved in file copies and zip files and such.
Found one of these in the firmware zip file of my soundbar today.
Just gitignore that. Same for dot idea and whatever vscode adds, if anything
git add .>git commit -m "initial">git pushLater when I
git statusor just look at the repo online… “oh crap I let .DS_Store in didn’t I…” and then I remember to set up a .gitignore and make a new commit to take out the .DS_Store and put in the .gitignore.You probably already know this, but for those who don’t, git can globally ignore patterns. It’s the first thing I set up after logging in. Honestly wish git just shipped this way out of the box (maybe match .DS_Store by name and some magic bytes?) with a way to disable it. Just for the sake of easier onboarding
honestly - while a Mac is certainly less painful to use than winshit, putting rubbish files recursively into each(!!) accessed folder, on all thumbdrives ever inserted, that’s something Jobs deserves to burn in hell for.
You’d want that, but a lot of programs do that, both in Windows and Linux.
e.g. The
.directoryfiles with the[]spec by freedesktop.org
Dolphin has the option to enable/disable the featureFWIW Dolphin only does it if the filesystem doesn’t provide a way to add that metadata directly to the directory and you change the view configuration for that directory away from your standard configuration. Which is how the standard describes to do it. (Some file managers incorrectly add those .directory files to every directory you visit.)
A mac will add a .DS_Store file to any directory just by breathing on it.
