I know the Windows OS is (generally) case insensitive. Is this true for all the Windows OSes (from Windows 95 up to Windows 7)? Is there any registry setup to make Windows case sensitive?
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2Yes, as were all versions of MS-DOS from where this attribute was inherited. (Of course MS-DOS didn't preserve case, so things have moved forward :-).)– RichardJul 21, 2010 at 9:03
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1Case insensitive with respect to what? File names? Passwords?– Peter MortensenJun 23, 2014 at 13:38
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Not by default. Here is the right answer.– WilliamOct 15, 2015 at 2:30
6 Answers
Yes, this is true for all versions of Windows. There is no way to make Windows case sensitive. Keep in mind though that some apps which were originally developed for Unix/Linux and then ported may be case-sensitive. Cygwin, for example, is case sensitive. This behavior is extremely rare though.
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10"There is no way to make Windows case sensitive." isn't quite accurate. There are ways to make parts of Windows case-sensitive, as explained in the other answers.– sleskeJul 21, 2010 at 8:52
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It's true though that from a user point of view, Windows filenames are case-insensitive, and there's no (easy) way to change that.– sleskeJul 21, 2010 at 8:56
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1This is not entirely true. You can make severs versions of Windows and some desktop version case sensitive with Windows Services for UNIX.– KeltariSep 21, 2013 at 22:58
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1@Matt This answer isn't right(although they are appropriate answers posted). You just don't have case sensitivity enabled. superuser.com/questions/266110/… I have to files one named testfile and Testfile.
/bIn/BaSh
doesn't work on my system.– WilliamOct 15, 2015 at 2:09 -
2This is not True anymore, Now you could make Windows 10 case sensitive on a per-directory basis. See this article for more info. Nov 26, 2019 at 22:54
Microsoft added a new case sensitive flag (attribute) that can be applied to NTFS directories (folders). For directories that have this flag set (enabled), all operations on files in that directory are case sensitive, regardless of whether FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS was specified. This means that if you have two files that differ only by case in a directory marked as case sensitive, all applications will be able to access them.
Starting with Windows 10 build 17107, Microsoft has added the ability to view and modify this flag to the fsutil.exe command.
To check if a directory is case sensitive, run the following command:
fsutil.exe file queryCaseSensitiveInfo <path>
To mark a directory as case sensitive, or case insensitive respectively:
fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo <path> enable
fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo <path> disable
Actually, this depends on the API / Windows subsystem you (your program) use.
If you use the "Windows API" (the standard for Windows apps), then filenames are case-insensitive. However, if you use the POSIX subsystem (aka Windows Services for Unix), you can enable case-sensitivity.
See e.g. this MS Support article: Enable case sensitive behavior with Windows XP and Interix Subsystem or SFU
Cygwin tries to emulate Unix. Thus it needs to inherit case sensitivity to not break applications. Windows on itself isn't case sensitive. It's about the file system. You can read more about it in File system, File systems under Microsoft Windows (Wikipedia).
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1Correct. NTFS is case-sensitive, it's only disabled in Windows. One can enable it but it is extremely
unsupported
..so to say.– ApacheJul 21, 2010 at 7:49 -
This is directed to the OP not MijndertStuij, but I didn't want to step on his toes. He deserves the rep on this one. Whether it's FAT (as the original MS-DOS and Windows versions) or NTFS (Windows NT and later), they are all case insensitive. You will notice these differences a bit if you save files to a Linux filesystem over Samba (File and Print Sharing's cousin). Oct 3, 2012 at 17:24
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From Wikipedia NTFS page: Allowed characters in filenames. - In Posix namespace, any UTF-16 code unit (case sensitive) except U+0000 (NUL) and / (slash). In Win32 namespace, any UTF-16 code unit (case insensitive) except U+0000 (NUL) / (slash) \ (backslash) : (colon) * (asterisk) ? (Question mark) " (quote) < (less than) > (greater than) and | (pipe) [5] Oct 3, 2012 at 17:29
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Try running
/bIn/BaSh
in Cygwin and tell me again that it is case sensitive.– MattFeb 18, 2015 at 20:54 -
Adding onto what @Apache said: it’s not so much as unsupported... it’s just that almost all of Windows is written under the assumption of case insensitivity. Many programs assume case insensitivity, too. For example, Adobe’s Creative Suite contains copies of the same DLL for each program (i.e. Photoshop has its own copy of the same DLLs InDesign uses). These DLLs are sometimes all lowercase, sometimes capitalized is various places, etc. And when it asks Windows for
abc.dll
, it’ll loadaBc.DlL
just happily. My guess is a holdover from 8.3 filenames where all filenames are uppercase. May 17, 2020 at 15:09
This is from here. You can set the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel\ dword:ObCaseInsensitive
registry value to 0
as other authors suggested. Create a file named add.reg
with the following content and run it.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel]
"obcaseinsensitive"=dword:00000000
Then use Cygwin to work with case-sensitive filenames.
In order to do so, you need to mount NTFS filesystems with posix=1
option in your /etc/fstab
, as this article suggests. Here's a snippet from my fstab
:
none /cygdrive cygdrive binary,posix=1,user 0 0
C: /cygdrive/c ntfs binary,posix=1,user,auto 0 0
C:/Users /home ntfs binary,posix=1,user,auto 0 0
Once the above is done, you'll be able to deal with case-sensitive filenames using bash
, mc
, git
etc.
Make sure to reboot after editing both.
Barfieldmv is correct. The filesystem is indeed case sensitive and files are stored with their appropriate case. The file access layer is responsible for removing the case when matching files to new file descriptors
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1Can you provide further details on how this abstraction between the filesystem and the user works (ie, provide a step by step example)? You should also address the op's actual questions on previous OSs and whether case-sensitive behavior can be forced.– MaQleodOct 3, 2012 at 17:16
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I won't be able to provide a very full answer nowadays since I'm a huge Linux nerd now.. However I can offer the following. Windows Services for Unix utilizes the same filesystems as the operating system does, specifically, by not using the APIs that enable case insensitivity. See: support.microsoft.com/kb/817921 for info on how Case 'Preserving' is the same as Case 'Sensitive' however the common access layers allow for Case 'Ignorance' :)– whardierOct 4, 2012 at 18:18
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You could say that windows is not case sensitive, but just case aware. That mean that it (windows) knows if letter is up case or lower case and it accepts both of them. It doesn't read one or the other as and error.– IGRACHNov 17, 2016 at 22:45