One more story from yesterday’s marathon debugging session. At one point, we were using RegFind to search the registry for badly registered COM interfaces. I was working on a branch, and we thought that old executables from my trunk build might still be registered. I used a command like this:

$ regfind -y ned\trunk\bin\

to find if any stuff from my trunk build was registered in the registry. The -y flag means search case-insensitively. When nothing turned up, our Windows expert said to also search with forward slashes since .NET uses them in paths when registering. So I did this:

$ regfind -y ned/trunk/bin/

and we found some registry entries.

Wouldn’t it have been cool if the -y flag also meant that “\” and “/” are equivalent? In VMS, the shell was case-insensitive, and as I recall, it considered “-” and “_” as equivalent. Case insensitivity usually only means that letters should be paired for equivalence, but why?