Feature #14715: Pathname#== should compare by #realpath instead of #to_s

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[hspazio (Fabio Pitino)]

Hi Core Team,

I'd like to report a confusing behaviour I noticed with Pathname#== comparison method.

See the following example:

Supposed I've created a file "file.txt" on /home/user/ directory.

require 'pathname'

Pathname('file.txt').file?  # => true, as expected
Pathname('FILE.txt').file? # => true, it seems it's pointing to the same file above
Pathname('FILE.txt').exist? # => true, seems correct

Pathname('file.txt') == Pathname('FILE.txt') # => false

# What's more interesting is:
Pathname('file.txt').realpath == Pathname('FILE.txt').realpath # => false

# Or:
Pathname('file.txt') == Pathname('./file.txt') # => false

Looking at the documentation (https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.5.0/libdoc/pathname/rdoc/Pathname.html#method-i-3D-3D), The "==", "eql?" and "===" seem to have identical C implementation. What's the reason for that?
Feels like the "===" makes sense to be strictly comparing String objects. However, as user of Pathname I'd expect the library to also make comparisons according to the domain rules of OS paths.

Right now, to have the comparison between the files above returning "true" i have to do the following:

Pathname('file.txt').realpath.to_s.downcase == Pathname('FILE.txt').realpath.to_s.downcase # => true

This feels like playing with Pathname internals to do something that pathname should do out of the box. Perhaps a new method?

At the OS level I if I do the following on my terminal:

touch file.txt
touch FILE.txt

I'm editing the mtime of the same file. The OS knows I'm talking about the same file as it considers paths case insensitive.

This does not seem to be the same for Pathname.

[jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans)]

• Tracker changed from Bug to Feature
• ruby -v deleted (ruby 2.4.0p0 (2016-12-24 revision 57164) [x86_64-darwin15])
• Backport deleted (2.3: UNKNOWN, 2.4: UNKNOWN, 2.5: UNKNOWN)