cannot rename to a string which differs only by case

[Patrick Byrne]

Binary package hint: nautilus

[Ubuntu 8.04 Nautilus 2.22.3]

Hi,

There appears to be a bug in the nautilus file rename feature.

You cannot rename a file to a name which differs only by case from the original name. For example, renaming a folder named 'Music' to music is not allowed. nautilus thinks that there is already a file called 'music' there. This would appear to be because the very file which is being renamed is matching a case-insensitive search for an existing file. The code should not count the file-being-renamed as a match in this case.

It is possible to rename 'Music' to 'music' by going through an intermediate step, eg 'Music' -> 'mMusic' -> 'music'.

Thanks,
Patrick Byrne

[A. Walton (awalton)]

Thanks for your bug. Please check that the filesystem supports this kind of rename (e.g. Fat works such that "Folder" and "folder" are the same file). If this is the case, your bug is a duplicate of 238391. Thanks again.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your report, in which filesystem are you doing that? if it's fat there's a bug about it bug 228348

[Patrick Byrne (pjlbyrne)]

Hi, it is my main filesystem partition, which is ext3.

ext3 does of course permit case-sensitive renaming. It is possible on the console to type:
  > ls
  Music
 > mv Music music
 > ls
 music

The problem is not that the filesystem does not permit the renaming. The problem seems to be that nautilus does not permit renaming (eg) 'Music' to 'music' because it thinks that there is already a file/folder present with the new name of 'music'. This is true inasmuch as the file/folder being renamed is called 'Music' (which is the same but for the case). It seems to me that code in nautilus is picking up the file-being-renamed as a file-which-has-the-same-name-preventing-renaming.

I suppose that the code fix for this would be, once the name conflict is found, to check if the conflicting file is actually the same as the file-being-renamed. (same inode?). This should allow in-place renaming of files to strings which are (case-insensitive) the same.

Regards,
Patrick Byrne

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

not confirming on my hardy installation, renaming works correctly

[Patrick Byrne (pjlbyrne)]

I am very sorry, the problem was occurring on a fat32 filesystem. I still think it is a valid problem: even though the base FAT32 filenames are only case-insensitive 8.3 format, the extended information for long, case-sensitive filenames is clearly being stored on top of this somewhere. I maintain that nautilus should allow renaming of a file/folder from 'Music' to 'music', without complaining about a duplicate.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find.