How Can Two Files in One Folder Have the Same Name?

filenamesfiles

I downloaded two files, they were both saved to the same filename and then I transferred them with scp to another computer.

Why didn't they become one when the second was saved?

Best Answer

Maybe they only look like they have the same name.

Try:

$ touch Stéphane Stéphane Stéphane\  St​éphane
$ ls -1
Stéphane
Stéphane
St​éphane
Stéphane

They look pretty much the same.

$ ls -1b
Stéphane
Stéphane
St​éphane
Stéphane\

Slightly better. The space character is flagged as \ (though not all ls implementations do that).

$ LC_ALL=C ls -1b
Ste\314\201phane
St\303\251phane
St\303\251phane\ 
St\342\200\213\303\251phane

Now we're talking (all non-ASCII characters are rendered as the octal value of their byte constituents)

You could also do, and that works for any input:

$ ls | LC_ALL=C sed -n l
Ste\314\201phane$
St\303\251phane$
St\342\200\213\303\251phane$
St\303\251phane $

Here, the end of lines is marked with $ which makes it easier to spot the trailing space. However, that won't help spotting a file called Stéphane<newline>Stéphane

$ ls | perl -Mopen=locale -MUnicode::UCD=charinfo -lpe '
       s/[^\41-\177]/"<".charinfo(ord$&)->{name}.">"/ge'
Ste<COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT>phane
St<LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE>phane
St<ZERO WIDTH SPACE><LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE>phane
St<LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE>phane<SPACE>

Makes it clearer what happened.

See also this other answer for more on the subject.

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