Partial Case Sensitivity with esxcfg-advcfg
Published on 5 Jan 2009 · Filed in Explanation · 196 words (estimated 1 minutes to read)I was working on some documentation this afternoon that centered around the use of esxcfg-advcfg to set some NFS-related parameters in VMware ESX. While verifying the command syntax, I noticed something interesting about the esxcfg-advcfg command: it’s only partially case-sensitive.
OK, this isn’t world-shattering news or a discovery of paramount importance, but I do find this a bit odd given that with the Linux-based Service Console most everything should be entirely case-sensitive. However, I found that with esxcfg-advcfg only part of the command needs to be properly capitalized.
Consider these examples. If I wanted to increase the maximum number of NFS datastores on VMware ESX, I would use this command:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 32 /NFS/MaxVolumes
This command will also work (note the capitalization, or lack thereof):
esxcfg-advcfg -s 32 /NFS/maxvolumes
But this command won’t work; it will report that it can’t find the parameter:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 32 /nfs/maxvolumes
I noticed the same behavior with a couple of other settings, so I’m reasonably confident that it’s not just this one setting. It appears that esxcfg-advcfg only cares if the first portion of the path is properly capitalized, and the rest of the parameter is case insensitive.
Interesting, no?