this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Why would case sensitive path names be considered dangerous?
I don't know about dangerous, but case-insensitive Unicode comparison is annoying, expensive and probably prone to footguns compared to a simple byte-for-byte equality check.
Obviously, it can be done, but I guess Linux devs don't consider it worthwhile.
(And yes, all modern filesystems support Unicode. Linux stores them as arbitrary bytes, Apple's HFS uses... some special bullshit, and Windows uses UTF-16.)
so if linux stores file names as arbitrary bytes them could I modify a ext4 fs to include a / in a file name
If you did it would likely break something as it's one of only two characters not allowed in a file name (the other being null).
You can do a lot of funky stuff within the rules though, think about control characters, non-printing characters, newlines, homographs, emojis etc. and go forth and make your file system chaos!