Make CD Command Case Insensitive in Bash – How to Guide

bashcd-commandshell

Sometimes while accessing the various directories it happens most of the times that I remember the names or at least part of the names of a directory under our Linux system. But some of the directories are named starting with first character caps or one of the characters in the middle of the name Upper case.

Can anyone suggest how can I make the arguments following cd command case INSENSITIVE, such that if I perform cd BackupDirectory or cd backupdirectory it could enter the directory name BackupDirectory.

Of course I don't want to screw the things for other users so if the above is possible, is that possible that the change could be applied just to the session I am using and do not effect other users?

Ok, I tried set completion-ignore-case on but this just doesn't work. It just helps in that if I type cd b and Tab or Esc Esc it fills the directory name ignoring the case. But, what I need is if I do a cd backupdirectory, it just ignores the case and enters BackupDirectory on its own.

Best Answer

Enabling cdspell will help:

shopt -s cdspell

From the man page:

cdspell If set, minor errors in the spelling of a directory component in a cd command will be corrected. The errors checked for are transposed characters, a miss- ing character, and one character too many. If a correction is found, the corrected file name is printed, and the command proceeds. This option is only used by interactive shells.

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Bash – How to use bash’s complete or compgen -C (command) option

It's the job of the -C command to figure out what text to insert in response to a completion request. The interface is a bit strange:

The argument to -C is interpreted as a bash script snippet. Bash appends three properly-quoted strings to this snippet:
- the command whose arguments are being completed;
- the prefix of the word where the cursor is, up to the cursor;
- the word before the cursor.
Some variables are added to the environment:
- COMP_LINE contains the complete line in which completion is performed.
- COMP_POINT contains the cursor position inside COMP_LINE (counting from 0).
- COMP_TYPE is 9 for normal completion, 33 when listing alternatives on ambiguous completions, 37 for menu completion, 63 when tabbing between ambiguous completions, 64 to list completions after a partial completion.
- COMP_KEY contains the key that triggered completion (e.g. a tab character if the user pressed Tab).
The output of the command is interpreted as text to replace the current word with. Note that this is a replacement, not a suffix to append; the command is supposed filter by the given prefix. It may contain multiple lines, in which case each line is considered a possible replacement.

This is roughly the same mechanism that is provided, and better documented, for functions with -F. Functions get a somewhat saner interface: they can read the list of words of the current command in the COMP_WORDS variable, and the starting position of the current word in COMP_CWORD; they write the results in the COMPREPLY array.

Since the useful arguments — in particular the prefix to complete — are passed at the end of the command, -C is pretty much only usable with an external command. Of course you can use something like sh -c …, but it won't be pretty.

complete -C 'sh -c '\'for x in one two three; do case $x in "$1"*) echo "$x";; esac''\'

Best Answer

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