I understand that the issue of supporting case-insensitivity has come up several times before, and was addressed in this forum and on the main FAQ. However, reading through the rationale for the previous decisions I'm wondering if there is still room for an ntfs-3g enhancement around case-insensitive handling in a few key areas? I'm especially interested in the possibility of at least supporting a non-POSIX name space on a Read Only mount, or basically case-insensitivity on reads only.

The FAQ (http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#posixfilenames1) states that, "While the NTFS-3G driver handles all of them, it always creates new files in the POSIX namespace for maximum portability and interoperability reasons." I think that fact is fine, and an understandable position for a Linux project such as this one. However, that goal wouldn't nullifying ntfs-3g providing support for reading in a non-POSIX manner.

I also note that Szaka, who has handled many of these request, points out in a few places (ex, this thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=408&hilit=insensitive) that ntfs-3g has no case-insensitivity plans because of concerns around linux programs working correctly. I believe that if it only allowed case-insensitity on a read only basis, that would not be a concern.

My last two points would be that the normal man(8) mount page I see does suggest that the ntfs mounts should support the posix switch to 0 or 1, so Linux itself seems to believe that some level of support for non-POSIX access to NTFS partition mounts is desirable. If the ntfs-3g goal is, "[this]... project's aim is maximum file level interoperability," (from this thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1030&hilit=posix) it seems like allowing easy access to partitions in the same manner that they were created (non-POSIX in the case of most Windows kernel and Applications,) helps forward that goal even if ntfs-3g still forces writes to be fully POSIX compliant.

So is read-only case-insensitivity something that the ntfs-3g project would consider? Considering that it has come up multiple times on the forum, it sounds like such an option would be utilized by the community.

Hi,


This took a long time, but is now available in ntfs-3g-2010.3.6AR.2, see http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-advanced/

You have to use an alternate driver called lowntfs-3g and set the mount option ignore_case. This driver uses a different fuse interface to avoid using case sensitive hashcodings in fuse.
Example :

Doing so, all file names are returned as lower case (useful for processing wildcards), but original case is kept when creating files (still in Posix name space)

Enjoy

Jean-Pierre