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No, case insensitive just means that the filesystem considers uppercase letters and lowercase letters to be the same. You have to be Unicode (or character set) aware for that.

You can set ZFS and in newer Linux Kernels for a filesystem to be case insensitive, and neither really cares about UTF8 to begin with as long as the filename contains no NUL characters.

Windows only requires the filename to be somewhat valid UCS-2 (ie, UTF-16 with the safeties off) on NTFS, FAT does the same for ASCII (though nothing stops a kernel from putting UTF8 in a FAT filename.



> No, case insensitive just means that the filesystem considers uppercase letters and lowercase letters to be the same. You have to be Unicode (or character set) aware for that.

I assumed in your case that meant ASCII encoding, but i still don't understand how turning off case sensitivity would speed up things. Was that a typo, or am i missing something?

> nothing stops a kernel from putting UTF8 in a FAT filename

Except interoperability with other systems who may access this filesystem of course. Thanks for this explanation.


> i still don't understand how turning off case sensitivity would speed up things.

Maybe it's very Samba specific, but when doing a directory listing on a case-insensitive SMB share it parses the entire directory first before returning the first result.

I forgot the exact reason why, maybe to resolve conflicts, say "foo.txt" and "FOO.txt" can only have one entry.

Regardless, the result is a massive initial delay. Marking the share as case-sensitive skips all this. Worked wonders for me anyway.

Also, when creating "Foo.txt" on a case-insensitive share, it has to check that it doesn't collide with any existing file with different case, etc.


That's also my understanding, but your initial comment suggested that turning off case-sensitivity sped things up. Sorry for the misunderstanding!




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