How to make autocomplete in the shell work with case-folding

bashcommand line

How can I make the autocompletion for files and folders in the bash shell work case-insensitively?

Ideally, cd ~/doc + tab autocompletes to cd ~/Documents (correcting the case as it autocompletes), but if that's not possible autocompleting to cd ~/documents is acceptable too.

Best Answer

You can do that by typing the following command in the terminal:

echo 'set completion-ignore-case On' >> ~/.inputrc

if you want to go back to the original behavior you have the open that file and remove the line.

The file ~/.inputrc file deals with mapping the keyboard for specific situations. This file is the start-up file used by Readline, the input-related library used by Bash, perl and most other open source programs.

The configuration options in .inputrc are particularly useful for customising the way Tab-completion works, e.g. with the ls command

When a program which uses the Readline library starts up, the init file is read, and the key bindings are set.

You can find more information about the file syntax in "Bash startup files".

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to make OS X’s bash expand $PWD to be case sensitive

You have two choices really: convert $PWD to a consistent case before comparing to your other string (which should also have consistent case). Or drop case-sensitive comparisons.

Converting it to lower case before comparing:

#!/bin/bash
if [ `echo $PWD | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` != /users/myuser/documents/backup ]
then
    echo "Wrong path: $PWD"
    exit 0
fi

Dropping case sensitive comparisons:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nocasematch
if [[ "$PWD" != /Users/myuser/Documents/Backup ]]
then
    echo "Wrong path: $PWD"
    exit 0
fi

How to echo shell script in Automator

To get your shell (bash) script to output to the screen continually so that you can see the progress, you need to launch it from AppleScript. Basically, this is a script that is launching another script. Use the script below to kick of the script that contains your ffmpeg command. You can even pass arguments to your script as you would normally.

For this example, I have a simple bash script that prints out the first command line argument.

#! /bin/bash
# test.sh
echo $1
exit

Next, is the AppleScript code that kicks off the bash script

tell application "Terminal"
   do script "<path>/test.sh 'Hello World'; exit"
   activate
end tell

Note, that if you have any strings with spaces that you need to pass, they MUST be enclosed in single quotes. Double quotes will cause an error in AppleScript.

When you run the script, it will open a Terminal window and anything that gets output will display on the screen.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to make OS X’s bash expand $PWD to be case sensitive

How to echo shell script in Automator

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