UNIX is case-sensitive. So, if you are searching for a file, but not sure of it’s case – whether it’s uppercase, lowercase or a mix of both, fret not, it’s not that difficult.
The solution to perform a case insensitive search is to use the find command. We need to pass a few parameters to the find command though.
directory – starting point in the directory hierarchy for the search
filename – the name of the file we are searching for
If we want to search for a file called “foo.c” in the HOME directory (in my case, HOME directory is /home/ibrahim):
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$ find /home/ibrahim -name foo.c -print |
The above command will search all the files in my HOME directory that are named exactly as foo.c. It will not match files called “FOO.C” or “Foo.c“.
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/home/ibrahim/tmp/foo.c |
To perform a case insensitive search, we will need to change the -name parameter to -iname instead.
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$ find /home/ibrahim -iname foo.c -print |
Below is a sample output of the find command.
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/home/ibrahim/tmp/foo.c /home/ibrahim/tmp/Foo.c /home/ibrahim/tmp/FOO.C |
To search only for files and exclude directory matches, pass “-type f” parameter to the find command.
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$ find /home/ibrahim -type f -iname foo.c -print |
Some variants of the find command do not support the “-iname” option. In that case, we will need to use the grep command to perform the case insensitive search.
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$ find /home/ibrahim -type f -name "*" -print | grep -i foo.c |
The find command will search for all files and pipe the output to the grep command. The grep command will then filter and print all case insensitive matches to “foo.c” due to the “-i” option.
Mohamed Ibrahim
ibrahim = { interested_in(unix, linux, android, open_source, reverse_engineering); coding(c, shell, php, python, java, javascript, nodejs, react); plays_on(xbox, ps4); linux_desktop_user(true); }
