§ Case Insensitivity and a bite in the ass
I made a disturbing discovery lately and I can’t believe that it has taken me this long to run across it. Case insensitivity in OS X can play havoc with a website, like completely bring it down, if any capitalization errors are made and not caught before moving to a case-sensitive server, like a unix server. And its all, most likely, attributable to HFS+.
I first noticed issues with including files in PHP. If I include a file that is named File.php and I request file.php there will be no error on OS X and the file will include. On unix this will fail. 4 years and I’ve never run into this before… I don’t know why. This one at least makes sense as it is the file system’s behavior and should be expected.
The next is a bit disturbing. Case insensitivity slips into MySQL. And not just through PHP. Through CocoaMySQL as well and even through the MySQL command line client. I’ve successfully called a table like AP_users by asking for AP_Users and gotten the right table, and successfully queried it as well. Again, moving the system to unix works as expected – table not found.
I’m not only baffled by this behavior but also by how I could have overlooked it for so long. My solution is gonna be to move all sites and sql databases to a UFS partition to force case sensitivity, unless, someone has a better idea (no, I’m not switching all out to *nix). So far this is the only solution I’ve been able to come to.
Tagged as: ass bite case hfs+ insensitive mysql osx php script unix
