- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
Why fight when you can just do
cd /mnt/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/
The number of times I had to ask “how can I tell where the file ‘physically’” (I know) “lives” on the network when I took up work at a Windows shop, it was just baffling. And Win people couldn’t understand what I was asking.
There’s a location for this effing thing. I want to know where it is, really! How do I get that info?!
Physically, it’s probably on your hdd or ssd. Or possibly just in ram or a data center somewhere 😜
Shouldn’t the blade be green? I thought Luke wore all black in ROTJ when he got hos green lightsaber.
Would it be more efficient to say Unix vs Windows?
You mean right vs. wrong?
Posix
I thougt linux is no longer Posix compliant, or is just partially posix compliant.
It was never fully compliant. POSIX threads, in particular, are a long time sticking point on Linux.
Is there any OS that’s fully POSIX-compliant?
Yes, in fact, there’s a formal certification process by the IEEE and the Open Group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#POSIX-oriented_operating_systems
Mind you, I think only one of the fully-certified OSen has any substantial use these days (MacOS X). People tend to overvalue it, IMO.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
Duel of the fates:
\//\
File systems aren’t even real.
at that point operating systems are also not real.
Wait, are we real?
What is this “real” concept anyway?
Adam Savage famously stated on Mythbusters “I reject your reality and substitute my own”
Sure, but is reality even real then? Is anything real?
Not that I meant to get all pop-philosophical on this beautiful Sunday morning, sorry about that.
I, too, first heard this quote from Adam on Mythbusters as a child. But, I’m pretty sure I also heard it was said first by some philosopher.
I would later be informed that “some philosopher” was the 1984 film The Dungeon Master.
Only apparently that was not the first, and it was said in a 1974 episode of Doctor Who. Well, someone on Reddit said that, and linked to this WikiQuote page but on that page it also says it’s from The Dungeon master.
So, I don’t know what to believe any more, and I still hope it was actually an obscure lost quote of Rene Magritte or something because in my head it would just make sense.
I love linux like a pet. I love windows like my car. Can we stop with this pointless making a content mountain over any insignificant difference. Don’t get me started
Linux is my car and pet at the same time. Does that make it a carpet?
Look again
Fun fact, though: Linux is the only case-sensitive one.
Edit: I feel silly for forgetting that it’s all about the choice of FS. If anyone needs anything from me, I’ll be in the corner, coloring.
I once ran into a bug in an Arduino program where it wouldn’t compile. The author blamed my “broken environment”. Turned out, he had included “arduino.h” instead of the correct “Arduino.h”.
From a technical standpoint, the windows NTFS filesystem is designed inherently case sensitive, just windows doesn’t allow creating case sensitive files.
Connecting an NTFS drive to linux, you can create two separate files readme.txt and Readme.txt.
Using windows, you can see both files in the filesystem, but chances are most (if not all) software will struggle accessing both files, opening readme.txt might instead open Readme.txt or vice versa.
You’re correct. I once was trying to rename a file in Windows in a git repository that had a wrong capitalization. It was tricky.
For a few years now, Windows has had the capability of marking certain directories as case-sensitive. So you can have a mixed-case-sensitivity filesystem experience now. Yeah. :/
Such a microsoft thing to do.
NTFS was designed back in the mid 90s, when the plan was to have the single NT kernel with different subsystems on top of it, some of those layers (i.e. POSIX) needed case sensitivity while others (Win32 and OS/2) didn’t.
It only looks odd because the sole remaining subsystem in use (Win32) barely makes use of any of the kernel features, like they’re only just now enabling long file paths.
Least favorite part of linux honestly
It’s a big difference whether a folder is named PetersHits or PeterShits. So what should I expect when opening a folder called petershits? Pictures of Peter on the potty or some great songs?
Hard disagree. I don’t understand why anyone would want case insensitive.
Am I the only one who doesn’t go around mindlessly capitalizing letters? Do people find it too difficult to capitalize things?
Do you want case insensitive passwords too?
If I type X I mean X and only X. Uppercase letters are different letters, just like X and Y are different letters.
It’s less about me randomly capitalizing letters and more about me not remembering whether or not what I’m looking for had capitals or not.
You okay?
Passwords ≠ Filesystems
Case-insensitive filesystems are for maniacs. They are only causing trouble. Ever had two folders with the same name but different capitalization in windows? You see both, but whichever you click it will always open the same one, while the other can’t be accessed. Psychopath behavior.
In my decades of IT work I have literally never seen this to be an issue. To myself or others.
Your username is 3 words. At a quick glance maybe they are 3 directories. I guess I have to use another command to find out.
You okay?
That’s because NTFS isn’t case-insensitive. If it was there’d be no two folders. Windows is a case-insensitive operating system running on a case-sensitive file system. It’s pretty clear Microsoft wanted case sensitivity and then realised how much legacy software that’d break.
You can turn it off, at least for ext4: https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/
Makes changing the case of a file/folder a lot easier though. Windows you have to rename it to something else then rename it again just to change case but Linux you can just…rename it. It’s a small thing but it’s something
is this bug really impossible to fix just because the file system is case insensitive?
Although you can use case insensitive filesystems with Linux, and case sensitive filesystems with macOS. I believe the case sensitivity is a function of the specific filesystem — but yeah, practically, the root for Linux is always case sensitive, and APFS
ain’tis only if you ask it to be ( https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/disk-utility/dsku19ed921c/mac ).When case insensitivity is the default I always wonder how many apps unknowingly rely on that due to typos somewhere. I encountered this once while porting a Windows/macOS app to Linux that someone imported a module with the wrong case and nobody noticed
VS Codium did that at some point, it probably still does but I haven’t checked
As is right and proper.
But why? What is the point?
That you can give 2 different files the same name? Because that would confuse the hell out of every regular user. Especially if you work on a network share and have an entire directory full of same named files because everyone and their grandma throws their files in there.
It is almost as bad as Case Sensitive Usernames and email.
On MacOS you get a choice when you format the drive.
If you know what a nordic keyboard layout looks like, you’d probably prefer backslash. Since I moved to Linux a year ago I’ve been struggling to find the easiest way to forward slash. Shift + 7? Or numpad / with my right pinky?
Had a similar struggle with the German layout, but in the meantime I have moved to the “EURKey” layout. It is built in to many distros and available for Windows and Mac. It mimics a US layout while still having all the äüöß (and much more) I could ever need. Though I will say it’s only really worth it if you’re in IT or similar where you frequently need certain symbols.
For me it’s even worse. Forward slash is also Shift + 7 and backslash is AltGr + ß?? I hate that computing is only optimized for US american layouts. Going by my keyboard, the filepath separator should probably be an ö.
Get a macro pad and configure one button to type a forward slash.
How do you type URLs using that keyboard layout?
Shift+7 feels wrong for some reason, so I currently tend to just send my pinky on a kamikaze mission towards the numpad hoping I hit /. Sometimes I hit numlock, sometimes I hit *.
Even if I made a compose key “shortcut” via ~/.XCompose it’d still be more work than what I’m doing already.Macro pad could be a solution, I have considered it beforehand for other purposes tbh
I don’t really watch Star Wars. I’m a more of a Trekkie gal.
🖖
See, you can separate files both ways as long as it’s logical
Specifying paths with - would be its own special brand of hell.
Both works fine in Windows tho?
Used to not
In Linux it is still not.
Actually, from what I can tell in my brief 15-minute internet search, every version of Windows since NT has accepted both because DOS 2.0 supported both. The exception to this was Command Prompt. But, these days, it supports both. Not sure when they made that change in Command Prompt, but I think it’s been that way since at least Windows 7.
Sadly, I had the great displeasure of writing code for Windows (and DOS) well before then.
Times change. You used to not be able to run Linux in Windows, but you can do that too.
Yeah, and I’ve tried that. It turns out it works even better if you throw away the Windows part.
Thanks be to God
Also the internet belongs on the left.
And really, Linux/macos could be reduced to “Unix” https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_history-simple.svg
Also the internet belongs on the left
This rings true in more ways than one.
Only Mac OS 10 and later, based on BSD, uses ‘/‘. (And, I guess, A/UX.) Classic MacOS used a ‘:’, but it wasn’t regularly exposed in the UI. The only way most users would know is that the colon couldn’t be used in a file name.
I might be wrong, but I think you still can’t use a ‘:’ in a filename in macOS. If I recall correctly it will let you do it and show it in Finder, but actually replace it with a ‘-’.
I mean literally… example.com**/**index.html
And BSD. It’s really just Windows vs. literally everything. Or is there anything else that uses backslashes?
Typical windows behavior
CP/M
Which in this context is named hilariously.
You can actually use / as a path separator on Windows in functions like fopen(), because it supports some ancient version of POSIX standard.
The one thing about NT was that it didn’t have it’s own semantics, but it could emulate any system you wanted. It’s the unofficial successor of an OS that was based on creating VMs where you could run any other OS you want.
Then Microsoft decided to create their own system in it, and only really finished writing that one.
There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was
SWITCHAR=-
in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn’t know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being “wrong”. The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn’t use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.
Here’s an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character
I don’t get it
The lightsaber direction is like / \
Linux uses forward slash. Windows uses backslash. Because some dude 45 years ago wanted to make it look different from UNIX.
Was that bill gates just to make one of the first incompatibilities in a long long run?
I understand pre-OS X Macintoshes used colons.
RISC OS uses periods and doesn’t have file extensions
They did! And I weirdly kind of miss them for the entirely non-logical reason that they looked elegant.
Don’t get me wrong, I adapted in about 3 seconds when I made the switch to Mac OS X 25 years ago, but I irrationally kinda miss them just a tiny bit.
Code in Rust and you can get double colons for your library path imports!
I hate that I need to use escape characters when creating something for windows.
Try pathlib. All your problems solved.
Python raw strings to the rescue!
Nobody is stopping you from using forward slashes. Python will translate the path for the current platform.
Python doesn’t have to. Windows supports both out of the box. Has been for many, many years
Good to know!
Pathlib is the answer.