This is awesome! Does anyone else wanna share some of the cursed knowledge they've picked up?

For me, MacOS file names are cursed:

1. Filenames in MacOS are case-INsensitive, meaning file.txt and FILE.txt are equivalent

2. Filenames in MacOS, when saved in NFC, may be converted to NFD

I'm in the process of writing up a blog post on how network shares on macOS are kind of cursed. Highlights:

* Files on SMB shares sometimes show up as "NDH6SA~M" or similar, even though that's not their filename on the actual network drive. This is because there's some character present in the filename that SMB can't work with. No errors or anything, you just have to know about it.

* SMB seems to copy accented characters in filenames as two Unicode code points, not one. Whereas native macOS filenames tend to use single Unicode code point accents.

* SMB seems to munge and un-munge certain special characters in filenames into placeholders, e.g. * <-> . But not always. Maybe this depends on the SMB version used?

* SMB (of a certain version?) stores symlinks as so-called "XSym" binary files, which automatically get converted back to native symlinks when copied from the network share. But if you try to rsync directly from the network drive instead of going through SMB, you'll end up with a bunch of binary XSym file that you can't really do anything with.

I only found out about these issues through integrity checks that showed supposedly missing files. Horrible!

I created one of the first CDDBs in 1995 when Windows 95 was in beta. It came with a file, IIRC, cdplayer.ini, that contained all the track names you'd typed in from your CDs.

I put out requests across the Net, mostly Usenet at the time, and people sent me their track listings and I would put out a new file every day with the new additions.

Until I hit 64KB which is the max size of an .ini file under Windows, I guess. And that was the end of that project.

> 1. Filenames in MacOS are case-INsensitive, meaning file.txt and FILE.txt are equivalent

It's much more cursed than that: filenames may or may not be case-sensitive depending on the filesystem.

Yep. Create a case-sensitive APFS or HFS+ volume for system or data, and it guarantees problems.

1 is only true by default, both HFS and APFS have case sensitive options . NTFS also behaves like you described, and I believe the distinction is that the filesystems are case-retentive, so this will work fine:

  $ echo yup > README.txt
  $ cat ReAdMe.TXT
  yup
  $ ls
  README.txt