Hi:

Suppose I have file ./My_Lasker_Games.pdf but all I know about the name is the it contains 'Lasker'. Then ls *lasker* won't do any good, because ls has no option for case sensibility. The outcome is that I'm forced to use find.

Wouldn't it be nice that ls had an option --ignore-case? Thanks for reading.

IMHO, it's easier to use something like , without adding any complexity, and potential of bugs

Or doing that, a classical example of unix-like principle of synergy

Simpler still,

Thanks. Anyways, I do not understand people who say ls has a great many options. To the degree that the cdrecord manual says:
BUGS:
Cdrecord has even more options than ls.
[END QUOTE]

ls has no more than 50 options, whereas the options in cdrecord are counted by the hundreds. And a lot linux programs have a much larger quantity of options than ls.

Or use shopt -s nocaseglob and shell filename expansion (a * will do):

1 members found this post helpful.

That's a good one.

The * is the most common pattern-matching symbol used in what is called "globbing", but there are other forms as well.

To match any single character, use ?.
And to match a selection or range of characters, use []
To exclude a character from a match, use ^ or ! as the first character in [].
You can read more about it here:

http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...ect_04_03.html

For more complex stuff, you'll need to use a tool like grep and regular expressions. This is covered in the rest of section 4 at the above link.

Finally, there's also an optional selection of extended globbing functions, explained here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/...ended-globbing


Of course, depending on how accurate you need the match to be, you could just leave off the first letter entirely.

By the way, the idea for an "ignore case" option in ls really doesn't seem very applicable to the way it functions. All ls really does is print out any files or directory contents that match the list you feed it. If you look at the options it does have, they're mostly there to control the formatting of the output (including what not to print). The input for ls is already effectively controlled by shell globbing, as already posted.

An example of a really useful new option for ls would be some way to easily exclude directories from the output.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...tories-835962/

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks David. And a special greeting to catkin for his truly useful post.