EXTOL Technology Blog

When most of us think about Case-sensitivity, we generally think of the way in which a program distinguishes between words using uppercase and lowercase letters.  It’s important to understand how systemically, this can influence the way in which files, directories, objects, and libraries are referenced.  Case-sensitivity makes things a little more complicated when multiple and remote systems are involved; often with more than one type of operating system.  A common EXTOL configuration may have EBI running on Windows, but reading and writing files from several other UNIX/Linux systems.  While Windows considers uppercase and lowercase letters in file names the same, Linux does not.  If we’re not careful, our integration may fail, all because of a simple letter. This blog discusses how different operating systems – Windows, UNIX/Linux, and System i – and their related file systems treat case-sensitivity.  It also suggests some general best practices. Read more…

In this age of the Internet, where information is exchanged between systems regularly, it is all too easy to forget that computer systems can store their “plain-text” data in a lot of different ways. If you thought that UNIX Files versus Windows Files were annoying with their Line Feed versus Carriage Return+Line Feed differences, can you imagine the trouble we would have if ASCII didn’t exist?

ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, has become a subset of many other character sets in common usage today, so you can exchange a lot of documents without too much hassle, but what do you do if you get something else?

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