Two files in the same directory with the exact same name?! #

What's up with this?

Let's find out. ls | od -a reveals:

Doh! Missed that space after the filename extension. (Thanks to Edgar Holmann & Tom Ivar Helbekkmo who posted to this thread back in 1990.)

UPDATE 1: See also Zhitao Zhou's Can we believe our eyes? which examines two "hosts" files in %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc caused by malware replacing "o" (Unicode 0x006F) with a nearly identical Cyrillic character (Unicode 0x043E).

UPDATE 2: Delete a directory with a trailing space in its name

UPDATE 3: These files both seemingly have the same filename and, though lacking file extensions, are identified in the "Kind" column as Word documents (DOC and DOCX, respectively):

Is there some kind of metadata/extended attribute magic going on here to allow this? Nope - just that durn trailing space again:

/nix | Jul 14, 2006


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