Apply setCaseSensitiveInfo recursively to all folders and subfolders

Question

I am trying to configure my dotnet core project (in Windows) as "case sensitive", so it behaves as in my production server (linux).

I have found this way of doing it:

fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo "C:\my folder" enable

The problem is that this function is not recursive:

The case sensitivity flag only affects the specific folder to which you apply it. It isn’t automatically inherited by that folder’s subfolders.

So I am trying to build a powershell script that applies this to all folders and subfolders, recursively.

I have tried googling something similar and just modifying the command line, but I don't seem to find the corrent keywords. This is the closest that I've gotten to this sort of example.

Answer 1

Correct code:

(Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory).FullName | ForEach-Object {fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo $_ enable}

Explanation:

NOTE: The code in the answer assumes you're in the root of the directory tree and you want to run fsutil.exe against all the folders inside, as it's been pointed out in the comments (thanks @Abhishek Anand!)

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory will give you list of all folders (recursively).

As you want to pass their full path, you can access it by using .FullName^[1] (or more self-explanatory | Select-Object -ExpandProperty FullName ).

Then you use ForEach-Object to run fsutil.exe multiple times. Current file's FullName can be accessed using $_ (this represents current object in ForEach-Object)^[2].

Hint:

If you want more tracking of what's currently being processed you can add the following to write the path of currently processed file to the console: ; Write-Host $_ (semicolon ; is to separate from fsutil invocation) as it was pointed out in the comments (thanks Fund Monica's Lawsuit !)

---

^{[1] .FullName notation works for PowerShell 3.0 and greater, Select-Object -ExpandProperty FullName is preferred if there's a chance that lower version will be used.}

^{[2] $_ is an alias for $PSItem}

Answer 2

(Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory).FullName | ForEach-Object {if (-Not ($_ -like '*node_modules*')) { fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo $_ enable } }

I modified @robdy's code to allow excluding node_modules. You can replace the "node_modules" bit in the above with anything to exclude filepaths containing it.

If you're working with npm, you probably want to exclude node_modules. @robdy's answer is great, but was taking minutes at a time iterating over every single node package folder even if I didn't have the package installed; given that this is something one might want to run fairly often since directories might be added all the time, and since you probably aren't modifying anything in node_modules, excluding it seems reasonable.

Answer 3

With Cygwin and bash shell, you can do this:

$ find $THEDIR -type d -exec fsutil file setCaseSensitiveInfo "{}" enable \;

It appears that Windows handles the '/' characters output by the find command just fine.

Answer 4

In my case I had to first enable the Linux subsystem before using the fsutil tool. So my steps were:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

then restart, and then @robdy 's solution:

(Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory).FullName | ForEach-Object {fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo $_ enable}

Answer 5

On windows 11, the other answers are not correct, as fsutil requires that the directory is not empty. To overcome this, I created a NEW empty directory, used fsutil file setCaseSensitiveInfo to set the case sensitive flag on the new directory, then MOVED the files from the other directory inside the new one. This works, as the directories are re-created when moved, and new directories inherit the case sensitive flag.