Re: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title)

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

AG wrote:
> I'm not an experienced Unix guru so I have
> to try and see if a command works. So I type
> something like:  x/yz - doesn't work. So I type
> X/yz - still doesn't work. So I call in an expert
> who tells me that it should be x/Yz (not X/Yz
> which I've also tried). When questioned *why*,
> the answer is a shrug and a simple reply "that's Unix"

You could try reading the manual. (Also, x/yz is not like
any UNIX command, so you have boiled down the original
problem beyond anything that an experienced UNIX guru
could explain to you correctly.) UNIX command names are
nearly always lower case, but their option may be of
both cases, especially when there are many.

One clever case where the convention was violated was in the
name of the debugger on some UNIX system I used, SCO I think.
It came in two flavors, "dbxtra" and "dbXtra". The former
invoked a command-line version that ran in a terminal session,
while the latter ran using a GUI (under X Window, hence the name).