On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 10:36 AM Justin Taylor <jtaylor.0ab@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
After a week puzzling over a weird problem, I determined that the issue was
because the user's home directory defined in his user profile was mixed
case. For reasons unknown, that made his current dir default to the root
(e.g. shell, WRKLNK). I changed the case of the home dir defined in his
profile, and all the problems went away.
Well, the reason isn't totally unknown: Clearly some relevant program
cares about the case, and as far as that program is concerned, there
was no directory that exactly matched the user profile. And any user
without a home directory defaults to the root directory.
Any way to fix this? The IFS root is supposed to be case insensitive.
There are different shades of case-insensitivity. At some basic level,
the file system *is* case-insensitive. You can't create both
'/home/jSmith' and '/home/JSMITH'.
However, lots of programs are *aware* of the case. They would have to
be, in order to be able to display 'jSmith' in the first place. And if
something is aware of the case, then there is always the chance that
the case will matter. For example, WRKLNK sorts its entries in
lexicographic order. If you create a brand-new '/home/jSmith', it will
be sorted ahead of all the all-caps home directories. But if you
delete that and create '/home/JSMITH', it will be sorted after
'/home/BJONES' and before '/home/KMARTIN'.[1]
So, you already stumbled upon the way to "fix" it: Give the program
what it wants and use all caps.
John Y.
[1] In this regard, the Windows directory listing facilities are
"more" case-insensitive. Your case will be preserved for display
purposes, but will not affect the sorting. The fact that WRKLNK
doesn't sort case-insensitive directories case-insensitively is highly
counterintuitive and annoying to me. I am going to charitably say that
since *some* directories *are* case-sensitive, and WRKLNK needs to
work with those too, sorting *all* directories case-sensitively
simplifies the implementation. (But I would have gone the extra mile
and sorted case-appropriately.)
midrange.com
