Cannot rename folder from FOO to foo on vfat disk

[komputes]

Steps to reproduce:
1) Create a Fat32 disk
2) Create a folder named FOO
3) Change the name to foo

Result:Fail
Expected:Name changed

Using ubuntu 9.10. Have not tested this on Win/Mac yet.

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Hello
Is this problem present with the latest updated Karmic's, Lucid's or Maverick's packages?
Thanks in advance
Fabio

[komputes (komputes)]

Hi Fabio, this is in fact a problem with the FAT filesystem not making distinctions between two files of the same name with different capitalization. However, this may be true of FAT, many other operating systems will allow you to adjust capitalization in the file name without having to add a character to make the name distinct.

[komputes (komputes)]

@ Fabio Marconi - This bug has been incorrectly assigned. I do not have windows-el (window manager for GNU Emacs) installed.

Note that this is an issue in nautilus but also happens when preforming the same task of renaming a file via the command line:

komputes@cool:~/test$ touch Foo
komputes@cool:~/test$ mv Foo foo
komputes@cool:~/test$ cd /media/vfat/
komputes@cool:/media/vfat$ touch Foo
komputes@cool:/media/vfat$ mv Foo foo
mv: `Foo' and `foo' are the same file

Notes ~/test is ext4, /media/vfat is fat32

[Emmet Hikory (persia)]

This is an intentional design choice for FAT32. As the filesystem is intentionally case-insensitive, it cannot work, and hence cannot be fixed in Ubuntu. Further, even if someone submitted a working patch to make it work in Ubuntu, we wouldn't want to fix it, as it would break compatibility with the other several thousand implementations of FAT32 floating around the internet.