Servers are Unix -Watch Your File Names

[twostep]

We are so accustomed in the microsoft world to having nearly nothing case sentitive. Passwords, of course, and c-language always are, but little else. Folder and filenames especially are not case sensitive. Neither are web names, nor html. Code used to be written exclusively in upper case because that's the way early terminals were. ( Anyone ever use an ASR33 teletype?)

BUT BUT BUT BUT..........
Enter Unix to the scene. It takes extra code to single case everything so that an application will be case insensitive. So Unix never bothered to spend the code (memories were measured in KB not MB) nor the speed penalty (cpu speeds were microseconds that's a thousand times slower than a gighertz). EVERYTHING was case sensitive. Unix spread rapidly in the academic world because of its single outstanding sterling quality -- early versions were FREE! Absurd character syntax and weird utility names were the rule. The most popular mailer was named for the author's cat.

Computer classes sprung up where the A+ grade went to the most "elegant" code. For the rest of us "elegant" meant obscure and difficult to use. Complaints were met with some form of "You're smart enough to do this aren't you?" Of course you can't change it -- for each little idiosyncrasy there were hundreds of programs that might fail if you fixed it.

For our purposes here, there is a case sensitivity on the server side that doesn't exist on your local pc. FILENAMES are CaSe SeNsItIvE. Yes, yes somewhere we heard all that. It's a potential trap for nasty obscure errors that are easily overlooked while you are rushing to fix some quirk in your templates. "Default" is not the same Unix file as "default".

With web error output as useless as it normally is, you'll have precious little help discovering the problem. So heads up and careful.

Simple enough, right? You'd never do that. Right? Well..... if you use Unix long enough, it WILL happen to you. Every novice and every pro has gotten nailed on this at some time. Beware. Be safe. Stick with lower case whenever possible.

You might guess that it happened to me. Let's just say that I'm tempted to pry the key top off the caps lock key tonight.

[Omar]

Just to put say i short and clear. On Linux servers (though i actually never tried that on Windows servers), both filename and folder names are case sensitive. To be on the safe side, just use low case letters for names, for example name your SS folder /store/ not /Store/, or name your files like myfile.html instead of MyFile.html