Environment, for remote script

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2007, David Bandel wrote:
>On 6/19/07, Dirk Moolman <DirkM at agilitytech.co.za> wrote:
>> Sorry, my fault.   I thought it was not picking up the correct variable,
>> but the person that set up the remote env file (setenv.sh), made a typo
>> in one of his variables, and used a lower case letter in one of the
>> PATHs, instead of uppercase.
>>
>> Interesting thing is, on the local server (the client), the path uses a
>> lowercase letter in this case, and on the remote server the same path
>> was set up using uppercase - took me a while to figure this out.
>>
>> This is what happens when you don't stick to naming conventions .....
>
>These are bad habits from Windoze that doesn't differentiate between
>upper and lower case for path names and doesn't use standard
>conventions like white space as argument separators (only Bill Gates
>knows what ridiculous convention he invented to parse a command line).

As usual Microsoft didn't invent anything to parse command lines, but took
what they bought from Seattle Computer which was basically a CP/M port to
the 8086.  CP/M used forward slashes for options on commands, hence when
His Billness took the idea of hierarchical file systems from Unix, he used
back slashes as path separators.

Case insensitivity was one of the first ``gotchas'' I ran into when I
started running OS X about six years ago.  It took me about an hour of
compiling existing code before things broke when it couldn't distinguish
between the ``Lib'' and ``lib'' subdirectories in my build tree.  At that
point I scrubbed the hard drive, creating a UFS partition that I could use
as it's case sensitive.  Some people on Apple's Unix porting mailing list
insisted that I didn't need case sensitivity (I figured they were too
sensitive to hear what I really thought about that :-).

Later versions of OS X implement case sensivity on the Apple file systems,
but not by default.  When I picked up a used 15in Powerbook recently, I
formatted the entire drive as case sensitive before installing Tiger.  I
think there are still some commercial applications that may be broken on
this, in particular the Reunion 8 genealogy software had problems with some
reports (and used Apple's resource forks which caused some ``interesting''
problems when copying files with programs which don't handle the resource
forks).

Bill
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