Mac OS HFS+ case-insensitivenesss screws SVN : phaq : http://phaq.phunsites.net

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So I work on OS X for a few years now, but until today that I didn't really care about the underlying HFS+ file system.
But while working on a project using SVN, I got this unexpected error message:



gianpaolo-del-mattos-macbook-pro:trunk Gianpaolo$ svn update

svn: URL 'svn+ssh://...../webinterface/files/lib/webmin' of existing directory '...../webinterface/files/lib/Webmin' does not match expected URL 'svn+ssh://..../webinterface/files/lib/Webmin'

What had happened? Looking into the repository I found two folders, one by the name of 'webmin' and the other being 'Webmin'.
Googl'ing for the error message I found references to SVN on Windows, having issues checking out folders by the same name onto a case-insensitive NTFS.

I though OS X would be case-sensitive, it's basically UNIXish in it's core, right? WRONG.
For historical reasons, OS X uses HFS+ with case-sensitivity disabled by default. Thus folders 'webmin' and 'Webmin' or even 'webmiN' are the same.

Test this on your own. Fire up a terminal and create a folder called 'Test'.



mkdir Test

Now try to enter it using the name of 'TESt':



cd TESt

You'll notice that it indeed works. HFS+ default settings are case-preserving, but nevertheless case-insensitive.

Solution? One possible work-around would be to REFORMAT the whole disk using HFS+ with case-sensitivity enabled, which would require a complete reinstall of OS X. There's some issues with this, though. Various sources report, that some applications may not work properly on case-sensitive HFS+ volumes.

So, a more versatile, but albeit complicated, work-around would be to create virtual disk image and use this to store case-sensitive content.
For this you need to start "Disk Utility". Although my screenshot is in german language, you should get the point easily.

Create a new disk image and give it some memorizable name (I used 'CaseSensitive' in the example) and store it in any folder you like

Give it some practical size depending on your need

Use HFS+ with journaling and case-sensitiveness as file system

Make sure you create this as a writable image

This will create a new disk image by the name of 'CaseSensitive.dmg'. It should get mounted automatically. If not, just double-clicking should do so.

Now you can move all your content to the Disk Image. When it's mounted, you can access it's path through '/Volumes/CaseSensitive' (the name in fact depending on the image name you chose earlier).

For me, this fixed the afore-mentioned SVN issue, as I could now properly checkout my repository and have the case-sensitive folders co-exist beneath each other.

Mission accomplished :-)