macOS diskutil

Case-sensitive APFS volumes/filesystems

By default, macOS creates case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystems. This means you can't have two files/directories that differ only in case - e.g. CVS and cvs for an actual example I've tripped over with pkgsrc.

diskutil allows the creation of case-sensitive volumes/filesystems:

$ diskutil apfs addVolume disk3 "Case-sensitive APFS" my_case_sensitive_vol
$ df -k /Volume/my_case_sensitive_vol

Note that for recent releases of macOS, the device on the boot volume that has the most free space and contains other volumes like normal home directories is disk3, not disk1.

See also

• diskutil man page at manpagez.com.