On Aug 14, 2007, at 11:44 PM, nikolai.weibull / gmail.com wrote: > So, should Pathname#== respect the platforms case insensitivity, for > example, on Windows and on Mac OS? Seems like a bad idea to me. Case sensitivity is not a property of the platform; it is a property of a given file system. It's easy to have some case sensitive and some case insensitive file systems on many platforms, including Mac OS and Windows. Besides, there is more to pathname equivalence than case sensitivity. For example, some older file systems defined case insensitivity based on the letters A through Z, completely ignoring other characters. Worse, they often just assumed 0x41 == 0x61, even for multi-byte character encodings (meaning two unrelated characters were considered equal). Some file systems take diacriticals into account, and some don't. In the end, you generally have to ask the file system to look up the path and return some unique identifier (such as a combination of device identifier and node number). Then you can (usually) compare those unique identifiers. That only works for paths that already exist. Predicting whether a non-existant path will be equivalent to some other path is hard. -Mark