Case-insensitive Glob on zsh/bash

Question

I need to list all files whose names start with 'SomeLongString'. But the case of 'SomeLongString' can vary. How?

I am using zsh, but a bash solution is also welcome.

Answer 1

ZSH:

$ unsetopt CASE_GLOB

Or, if you don't want to enable case-insensitive globbing in general, you can activate it for only the varying part:

$ print -l (#i)(somelongstring)*

This will match any file that starts with "somelongstring" (in any combination of lower/upper case). The case-insensitive flag applies for everything between the parentheses and can be used multiple times. Read the manual zshexpn(1) for more information.

UPDATE Almost forgot, you have to enable extendend globbing for this to work:

setopt extendedglob

Answer 2

bash:

shopt -s nocaseglob

Answer 3

Depending on how deep you want to have this listing, find offers quite a lot in this regard:

find . -iname 'SomeLongString*' -maxdepth 1

This will only give you the files in the current directory. Important here is the -iname parameter instead of -name.

Answer 4

$ function i () {
> shopt -s nocaseglob; $*; shopt -u nocaseglob
> }
$ ls *jtweet*
ls: cannot access *jtweet*: No such file or directory
$ i ls *jtweet*
JTweet.pm  JTweet.pm~  JTweet2.pm  JTweet2.pm~