Ken's Techno Tidbits

I ran into a puzzling test failure recently, which I ultimately tracked down to some very strange directory name handling behavior in Mac OS X (I’m running 10.5).

Previously I’d had a directory in my user directory called “SVN”, and this is where I’d checked out all of my SVN-hosted projects. At some point in the past I changed the name of this directory to be “svn”.

In the terminal, it shows the directory as having the lower-case name, as expected.

But in Java, if I call File.getCanonicalPath() on a file in this directory, the directory name comes back as the old “SVN”. And that in turn caused some tests to make assumptions about the nature of the filesystem, which triggered a cascade of failures.

To fix it, I created a new temp directory, moved everything from inside “svn” over, deleted “svn”, then created a new “svn” and moved everything back. Really strange…