Hi, all.

I have found what seems to me at least an asymmetry in the way Stata deals with files with respect to the case of their names.
Of course, I’m talking about the Linux version, the only one in which case sensitivity of filenames is real.

I am not talking about having filenames with the same letters in different cases: this would be crazy and not portable to Windows and Mac.
I’m also aware that all the official ado and help file names are all lowercase, although nothing is explicitly said about this aspect in the file naming convention paragraph of the User Guide, nor in programming style rules.

However, a user of mine, who developed an ado file, the name of which has an uppercase part (to increase the readability of a relevant acronym), also wrote the corresponding help file with the same name (and sthlp extension, of course) and, whilst the ado file is correctly found and run, the help file is not found, unless its name is converted to all lowercase. After that, whatever “casing” is used in a help command invocation, the file is found and displayed in the viewer.

Now, I can tell my reluctant user to only use lowercase for everything; but if the unwritten rule is to only use lowercase filenames and commands, using mix-cased names should be a stopping error in both cases of ado and sthlp files, not for sthlp only.

In other words, it seems that when an ado file is searched for, its name is left unchanged, while when an help file is searched for (by the help command only), its name is lowercased first.

What do you think?
Is there a document where the filenaming rules cover this aspect?


Example:
If I have
~/ado/personal/MYcommand.ado
~/ado/personal/MYcommand.sthlp

. MYcommand works
. help MYcommand fails (help looks for mycommand.sthlp and complains it does not exist)


If I have (and this is a possible solution, transparent to the other users)
~/ado/personal/MYcommand.ado
~/ado/personal/mycommand.sthlp

. MYcommand works
. help MYcommand works
. help mycommand works too
. mycommand fails


Thanks for your attention.