When I try and create or name a folder to 3 characters or less and try to capitalize any of the characters, all of them remain lower cased.
This is a really annoying.
I only tried this on folders in konqueror.
I think that this problem has something to do with the file extensions (considering that most are 3 characters or less), but I thought that file extensions weren't important in Linux.

For example:
creating the folder "RA"
gets renamed to "ra"

Has anyone had this problem as well?
Does anyone know of a way around this?

Thanks in advance
Bendeco

have you tried making them from the command line? you should be able to create a directory in uppercase with even one character.

Yes, I just tried this...
But it doesn't work either.
Konqueror still reads it as lower case, and when I 'ls' it is also listed as lower case.

But thanks for the suggestion.

I think you're right in the case of vfat mounted partitions. It refuses to make folder names all caps unless the folder name is over eight characters long. I think it's just a vfat odd ball thingy.

1. Is this happening on a vfat mounted partition?
2. Can you use ext3 instead?

Yep, this is a FAT16 / FAT32 thing. These two are not case sensitive file systems, and so store as lower case all the time. A folder called TesTinG is the exact same as testiNg, on FAT. So, any upper / lower case changes you make won't be saved. That's how it is with junky case insensitive filesystems

Thanks alot for all of your replies...

I AM using a vfat partition, but it's a spare harddrive that I have had for a long time and haven't been able to back up the data to reformat it. I'm just glad it's not a Linux problem.

Does the NTFS format behave in this same manner?

Thanks again
Bendeco

I don't think so but it's a step in the wrong direction.
You would have to enable ntfs support on your linux box which can be a pain.

Yea, I'm with ya there, configuring the Kernel, etc.
but I'm trying to keep this harddrive compatible with windows.
I guess I'll just have to deal with the character problem or go through the painful process of setting up support for NTFS.
I read somewhere that the Kernel was eventually going to have full (default) support for NTFS partitions, but I may be wrong.
Oh well...

Thanks for the info,
Bendeco

at least if you switch to NTFS you'll fix your problem: you won't have to worry about upper or lower case anymore, because you won't be able to write anything.

fwiw, i can make directories with uppercase characters on my samba mounted fat32 filesystems. not sure about all the weirdnesses of windows 8+3 stuff, etc. to know why, but i just wanted to put out there for you that it is possible to have fat32 and make uppercase directory names.

I think that there are mount options for fat32 that deal with case sensitivity. Perhaps the problem has to do with how the drive is mounted. If you use the "utf8" option for instance, you should be able to have folders in Russion if you wanted to.

Please refer to the mount and fstab man pages.