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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Unix History Question: Why are filenames/dirnames case sentsitive in Unix? Post 66446 by Perderabo on Monday 14th of March 2005 01:22:33 PM
Old 03-14-2005
Thoughout the sixties, computers were upper case only. Most printers could not print a lower case letter. Crt's were very rare, and printing terminals could not handle 2 cases. I used to enter my programs on a 029 keypunch which was upper case only.

Unix bucked the trend by supporting two cases. Look at the "stty iuclc" and "stty olcuc" commands. These show the hoops that unix had to jump through to support two cases in a one case world. I believe that they did it to support the Ascii standard which very clearly states that A and a are two different characters.

Microsoft built dos for IBM. At first it was called "PC-DOS". I think IBM wanted compatability with it's other OS's which were monocase.
 

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tolower(3C)						   Standard C Library Functions 					       tolower(3C)

NAME
tolower - transliterate upper-case characters to lower-case SYNOPSIS
#include <ctype.h> int tolower(int c); DESCRIPTION
The tolower() function has as a domain a type int, the value of which is representable as an unsigned char or the value of EOF. If the argument has any other value, the argument is returned unchanged. If the argument of tolower() represents an upper-case letter, and there exists a corresponding lower-case letter (as defined by character type information in the program locale category LC_CTYPE), the result is the corresponding lower-case letter. All other arguments in the domain are returned unchanged. RETURN VALUES
On successful completion, tolower() returns the lower-case letter corresponding to the argument passed. Otherwise, it returns the argument unchanged. ERRORS
No errors are defined. ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |CSI |Enabled | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Interface Stability |Standard | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |MT-Level |MT-Safe | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
_tolower(3C), setlocale(3C), attributes(5), standards(5) SunOS 5.10 14 Aug 2002 tolower(3C)
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