Can I make Tab auto-completion case-insensitive in the terminal?

Question

Ubuntu's Terminal uses case-sensitive auto-completion, as I suppose would be expected for Linux.

But I think it would often be more convenient to use a case-insensitive one instead, to save you having to be accurate while starting a name, and would probably be worth the extra false positives. Is it possible to change this behaviour?

Answer 1

Open a terminal, run

# If ~./inputrc doesn't exist yet, first include the original /etc/inputrc so we don't override it
if [ ! -a ~/.inputrc ]; then echo "\$include /etc/inputrc" > ~/.inputrc; fi

# Add option to ~/.inputrc to enable case-insensitive tab completion
echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

Start a new shell / terminal

to make this change for all users, edit /etc/inputrc

For details , see man bash . Yes it is a long page, but bash is a somewhat complex program, and if you want just search that page for "case-insensitive" to go to the relevant section. People usually learn bash one option at a time or one bash script at a time and it takes a long time to master all the nuances. Your interest may vary.

Answer 2

Open a terminal and type the below command:

echo set completion-ignore-case on | sudo tee -a /etc/inputrc

Enter password. Restart terminal.

If in some case you want to remove case insensitive, just edit /etc/inputrc file by removing the set completion-ignore-case line.

That's all.