make file running on Linux - how to ignore case sensitive?

Question

I have a huge project, whole written in C language and I have a single make file that is used to compile it. The project C files contains lots of capitalize problems in it's header files, meaning there are tones of header files that were miss-spelled in lots of C files. The problem is I need to migrate this project to compile on Linux machine and since Linux is case sensitive I got tones of errors.

Is there an elegant way which I can run make file in Linux and tell him to ignore case sensitive? Any other solution will be welcome as well.

Thanks a lot. Motti.

Answer 1

You can mount the files on a case-insensitive file system. FAT comes to mind. ntfs-3g does not appear to support this.

Answer 2

Well I can only tell you that you need to change the case of those header files. I don't know that there is any way you can make it automatic but still you can use cscope to do it in a easier way.

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name=ManPage&sec=1&manpage=cscope

Answer 3

You'll have to fix everything by hand and rename every file or fix every place with #include. Even if you have a huge project (comparable with linux kernel), it should be possible to do this during a hour or two. Automation may be possible, but manual way should be better - because script won't be able to guess which name is right - filename, or the name used in #include.

Besides, this situation is a fault of original project developer. If he/she wasn't sloppy and named every header in every #include correctly, this wouldn't happen. Technically, this is a code problem similar to syntax error. The only right way to deal with it is to fix it.

Answer 4

I think it takes not too long to write a small script, which goes thru the directories first, then replaces C headers. Explained:

1. Scan the headers' folder and collect filenames.
2. Make a lowercase list of them. You have now original and locased pairs.
3. Scan the C source files and find each line contains "#include"
4. Lowercase it.
5. Find the lowercase filename in the list collected and lowercased from headers.
6. Replace the source line with the one collected from headers.

You should put the modified files into a separate folder structure, avoid overwriting the whole source with some buggy stuff. Don't forget to create target folders during the source tree scan.

I recommend a script language for that task, I prefer PHP, but just it's the only server-side script language which I know. Yep, it will run for a while, but only once.

(I bet that you will have other difficulties with that project, this problem is not a typical indicator of high quality work.)

Answer 5

I use the find all and replace all functionality of Source Insight when i have to do complete replacement. But your problem seems quite big, but you can try the option to replace every header file name in all occurences of source files using the "Find All" + "Replace" functionality. You can use notepad++ too for doing the same.

Answer 6

A long time ago there was a great tool under MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) called Canon. It was used to canonize text files, i.e. make all symbols found in a given refernce list have have the same usage of upper/lower case. This tool would be ideal for a task like this - I wonder if anything similar exists under Linux ?