Caution on unZip and duplicated file names

Symptom: You unZip your module file and re-zip it for some reason. Thereafter one or more image files are missing. You can’t find the missing images in any previously unzipped file but you do find images with the same name, differing only in case… e.g. myfile.jpg instead or MyFile.jpg.

Cause: Your unZip programme is only restoring one of the image files wherever a set of files shares the same name, differing only in upper/lower case. Effectively masking the image(s) that you want to recover.

Solution: Always use a unique name for images, case insensitive. Also, maybe the UnZip programme can be told to recover files regardless of case.

Workaround: Remove the masking images from the module. If necessary, use Tools…Remove Unused Images. Next time you UnZip, you should find the images that were missing from the zip file.

The reason you’re seeing this behavior is that you’re unzipping to a case-insensitive filesystem. A case-insensitive filesystem considers picture.png, Picture.png, picture.PNG, PICTURE.PNG, PiCtUrE.pNg, etc. to all be the same file. ZIP archives, however, are case-sensitive and can store each of those as different files (as can most Unix filesystems).

Thanks Joel for the explanation. I admit I thought MacOS file system was case sensitive. Turns out either it isn’t or somehow I’ve set it up that way.

HFS+ (and I think also APFS) is the worst possible combination: case-insensitive but still case-preserving.