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Here's the deal, I have a huge mess of files on an external drive that is formatted as NTFS. I wish to copy all of these files onto my MacBook Pro.
NTFS, like sane filesystems, is case sensitive. HFS is not.
There is, somewhere in the mess of tens of thousands of files and directories, one or more 'duplicates' in the eyes of HFS. Theses are preventing me from copying the entire directory of data onto my mac.
(MacOSX rather unhelpfully throws a general error explaining the problem, but not the exact file. It also doesn't give you an option to skip)
What is the best approach to solve this? Does anyone know a tool that can find files and directories that have the same case-insensitive name?
--Edit--
So I did a cp -i
and left it running overnight with the intention of waking up and seeing it stuck on a duplicate, but when I woke up it had finished! However, the resulting directory had 13,906 items while the original has 13,914, so it sounds like cp
either doesn't recognise files that are the same given case insensitivity, or it ignores them even with -i
.
1Out of curiosity, how did you end up with these dupes? Have you been using the POSIX subsystem under Windows? – Hugh Allen – 2010-04-02T08:10:00.193
But Mac OS X doesn't use HFS. It uses HFSX, a variant of HFS+ with optional - wait for it - case sensitivity. – None – 2010-04-02T10:46:35.387
@Graham, awesome, can I turn it on without formatting my entire drive? – SCdF – 2010-04-02T15:28:50.790
@Hugh, it's a bunch of data from a previous Linux install, but on NTFS for various reasons (it's the easiest to get working on all 3 OSs for a start) – SCdF – 2010-04-02T15:30:40.660
NTFS, like sane filesystems, is case sensitive. HFS is not.
no, NTFS supports case sensitive, but on Windows it's turned off because programs would complain. HFS+ also has case sensitive and case insensitive version. HFS virtually doesn't exist nowadays – phuclv – 2016-04-03T16:07:45.327