I'm currently in the process of creating a perl/TK frontend for read-only access to some data. The contents don't matter for this question (but are from a DOS star-mapping program for the Traveller RPG, called Galactic).

My problem is this: the files in question were originally created on a case-insensitive (but case preserving) filesystem, and were done so by hand. This has resulted in wildly differing casing between the files' names and the references to filenames in the files themselves. For example, ARAMIS.DAT might be referred to in one place as aramis.DAT, in another as Aramis.dat, etc.

I have two options - the easy, shortsighted solution would be, of course, to upcase all the filenames on disk, then upcase any references as used. The problem with this is that I'm not sure that I have the right to redistribute the data-files, and if the (eventual) users have to download the files themselves, they won't have the uppercase versions.

I'd very much like some advice on how to best go about the harder route - causing the program to treat the data case-insensitively on Unix (and other case-sensitive) file systems. Here's a naive attempt:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w                                                    
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use strict;

my $name = 'aramis.DAT';
opendir $dh, '/directory';
my @dirs = readdir($dh);
closedir $dh;
for my $dir (@dirs){
    if (/$names/i){
    open (my $fh, '<', "/directory/$dir");
    . . .
        close $fh;
    }
}
[download]

Is this remotely pointed in the right direction?