MS Windows NT4/200x/XP file names may be up to 254 characters long, and UNIX file names may be 1023 characters long. In MS Windows, file extensions indicate particular file types; in UNIX this is not so rigorously observed because all names are considered arbitrary.

What MS Windows calls a folder, UNIX calls a directory.

MS Windows file names are generally uppercase if made up of 8.3 (8-character file name and 3 character extension. File names that are longer than 8.3 are case preserving and case insensitive.

UNIX file and directory names are case sensitive and case preserving. Samba implements the MS Windows file name behavior, but it does so as a user application. The UNIX file system provides no mechanism to perform case-insensitive file name lookups. MS Windows does this by default. This means that Samba has to carry the processing overhead to provide features that are not native to the UNIX operating system environment.

Consider the following. All are unique UNIX names but one single MS Windows file name:

				MYFILE.TXT
				MyFile.txt
				myfile.txt
		

So clearly, in an MS Windows file namespace these three files cannot co-exist, but in UNIX they can.

So what should Samba do if all three are present? That which is lexically first will be accessible to MS Windows users; the others are invisible and unaccessible any other solution would be suicidal. The Windows client will ask for a case-insensitive file lookup, and that is the reason for which Samba must offer a consistent selection in the event that the UNIX directory contains multiple files that would match a case insensitive file listing.

MS Windows and DOS use the backslash \ as a directory delimiter, and UNIX uses the forward-slash / as its directory delimiter. This is handled transparently by Samba.

MS Windows products support a notion of drive letters, like C: , to represent disk partitions. UNIX has no concept of separate identifiers for file partitions; each such file system is mounted to become part of the overall directory tree. The UNIX directory tree begins at / just as the root of a DOS drive is specified as C:\.

MS Windows generally never experiences file names that begin with a dot (.), while in UNIX these are commonly found in a user's home directory. Files that begin with a dot (.) are typically startup files for various UNIX applications, or they may be files that contain startup configuration data.

MS Windows make use of links and shortcuts that are actually special types of files that will redirect an attempt to execute the file to the real location of the file. UNIX knows of file and directory links, but they are entirely different from what MS Windows users are used to.

Symbolic links are files in UNIX that contain the actual location of the data (file or directory). An operation (like read or write) will operate directly on the file referenced. Symbolic links are also referred to as “soft links.” A hard link is something that MS Windows is not familiar with. It allows one physical file to be known simultaneously by more than one file name.