Case-insensitive completion in bash

Question

I have a folder ~/TestFolder. The current working directory is the home directory(~).

I want to enter a partial command, for example cd test, and I want it auto filled to give the command cd TestFolder upon pressing Tab.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Bash

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc-file:

bind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on'

This enables case-insensitive completion in bash, as explained by Gilles' answer in How to make cd arguments case INsensitive?.

Tested with bash 5.0.17 on Ubuntu 20.04.

Other options

I have only tested bash and zsh. This is what I found out for other shells:

The other option in the linked answer adds set completion-ignore-case on to inputrc. That could be used by other shells, too. According to this answer, which also talks about whether to use this option with bash.

Therefore, if not using bash, researching your specific shell first is a good idea (unless others will add tested answers for other shells).

Zsh

zsh uses a different line editor and not readline/inputrc. On install it gives the option to press 2 to add a recommended ~/.zshrc, which already includes the following line. It makes the the desired behaviour work out of the box:

zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list '' 'm:{a-z}={A-Z}' 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za- z}' 'r:|[._-]=* r:|=* l:|=*'

Tested with zsh 5.8 on Ubuntu 20.04.

This also might be helpful: Combining zsh’s tab completion with case insensitivity