osx filesystem writes are not always guaranteed to match requested casing

[cdaringe]

Version: 10.12.0
Platform: Darwin m-c02x6042jgh7 18.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 18.2.0: Mon Nov 12 20:24:46 PST 2018; root:xnu-4903.231.4~2/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

problem

• fs.writeFile isn't guaranteed to match the requested filename casing.

example:

• fs.writeFile('/path/to/Thing.js', ...) may generate /path/to/Thing.js, but, a subsequent process that runs
• fs.writeFile('/path/to/thing.js', ...) may generate /path/to/Thing.js, instead of /path/to/thing.js

this occurs when writing a file that does not exist, but previously existed in different casing.

reproduction

it's tricky. i've tried--but i cannot generate a set of reliable conditions that induces the failure.

i've observed this twice in the wild now, on two different OSX machines.

1. 1st was back in 2017, where i thought the fault was with nyc, as seen in Old removed files seem to stay cached in reports istanbuljs/nyc#644
2. 2nd was today, in typescript, as shown in this live demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS50DmFZCJw&feature=youtu.be

i'm not 100% convinced it's even a node bug--it could very well be an OSX issue. i found that restarting my system resolved one occurrence of the failure, but not all.

sorry that i cannot reproduce reliably. however, it's the repeatability of which is in fact the problem that i am reporting! :)

[devsnek]

If the file already exists with a different casing, that casing will be used. MacOS filesystems are case insensitive by default.

[Trott]

This is the way the default case-insensitive macOS filesystem works and doesn't have anything to do with Node.js. AFAIK, you will get the same result using any other programming language or the shell CLI:

$ ls
$ ls foo
ls: foo: No such file or directory
$ touch Foo
$ ls foo
foo
$ ls Foo
Foo
$ ls FOO
FOO
$ ls
Foo
$ cat Foo
$ echo 'whatevs' >> Foo
$ cat Foo
whatevs
$ echo 'fhqwhgads' >> foo
$ cat Foo
whatevs
fhqwhgads
$ ls
Foo
$ cat FOO
whatevs
fhqwhgads
$ ls FOO
FOO
$ 

[Trott]

I'm going to close this but feel free to re-open or comment if there's a subtlety I'm missing here. Thanks!

[cdaringe]

there is a subtlety missing in both above assessments. The file no longer exists. I'm writing a non-existent file, and the newly flushed file uses an old file name. The issue is not that Mac OS is generally case insensitive, it's that old filenames are being recycled when they should not be

[cdaringe]

Sorry, I should have made that more clear in the problem description. The referenced YouTube video shows it very clearly

[devsnek]

@nodejs/fs could this be the realpath cache?

i tried to think of ways to reproduce this but couldn't come up with anything

[thefourtheye]

Looping in @nodejs/libuv as well.

[thefourtheye]

Also /ping @nodejs/platform-macos

[bnoordhuis]

@cdaringe Do you have any further info? This appears to be a heisenbug?