rm -R behaviour?

[jmadero]

I wanted to ask about this just so that...I understand the logic of what happened.

I was reinstalling Ubuntu, tried renaming my home folder from User to user (using the live distro)

Told me that the folder already existed (but I didn't see anything, I saw User but not user)

After several attempts I just thought "why not do sudo rm for the folder I don't see"

so I did sudo rm -R /home/user

my entire home folder named User was deleted.

Does Ubuntu not know the difference for capitals with the rm command? Just curious more than anything, I doubt I'll make the mistake twice....

[coopstah13]

if you look at the man page for rm, -r and -R are the same option, i should add that this is even true on my centos4 box

[um_nirvani]

rm -R

Recursively deletes everything, the directory and all the contents inside it.
as a fool i tried this a long time back and I removed some 20 + GB of data.

Be very sure before running it next time.

[i92guboj]

Does Ubuntu not know the difference for capitals with the rm command? Just curious more than anything, I doubt I'll make the mistake twice....

I can only think of one reason why this could happen: the partition was vfat or something similar. On vfat you can't have two files named "file" and "File" on the same directory, since it's intended to be compatible with windows.

If that wasn't the case, then either your shell or the basic linux tools have been patched in a way that they should never be. I can't be sure about that because I am not an Ubuntu user (and this would be yet another reason to add to the long list of reasons not to use Ubuntu). But until we can find the real reason, I will assume for good that the Ubuntu developers are not that insane.