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Chillar Anand
Chillar Anand

Posted on • Originally published at avilpage.com on

The Strange Case of Dr. Linux and Mr. Mac

Few days back, some of the tests started failing on CI server. When I tried to run the tests locally, they were passing.

After debugging for a while, I found that the tests were failing because of the case sensitivity of the file system. One of the developer was using Linux and had committed 2 files with the same name but different case(config.json, Config.json).

Linux file system is case-sensitive. So these 2 files will be shown as 2 different files.

linux-file-system

But Mac/Windows file system is case-insensitive. Out of these 2 files, only one file will be shown.

mac-file-system

Due to this, the tests were failing on Linux but passing on Mac. Once the case of the file was corrected, the tests started passing on both the systems.

I have been using Mac for a long time and never faced this issue. Even though Mac's APFS is case-insensitive, we can create a case-sensitive volume using Disk Utility.

case-sensitive-volume

We have to be aware of these differences when working on a project with developers using different OS.

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